On Concavity of the Monopolist's Problem Facing Consumers with Nonlinear Price Preferences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A monopolist wishes to maximize her profits by finding an optimal price policy. After she announces a menu of products and prices, each agent x will choose to buy that product y ( x ) which maximizes his own utility, if positive. The principal's profits are the sum of the net earnings produced by each product sold. These are determined by the costs of production and the distribution of products sold, which in turn are based on the distribution of anonymous agents and the choices they make in response to the principal's price menu. In this paper, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the convexity or concavity of the principal's (bilevel) optimization problem, assuming each agent's disutility is a strictly increasing but not necessarily affine (i.e., quasilinear) function of the price paid. Concavity, when present, makes the problem more amenable to computational and theoretical analysis; it is key to obtaining uniqueness and stability results for the principal's strategy in particular. Even in the quasilinear case, our analysis goes beyond previous work by addressing convexity as well as concavity, by establishing conditions which are not only sufficient but necessary, and by requiring fewer hypotheses on the agents' preferences. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".