时间：5月15日（周四）10:30-12:00

地点：北京大学经济学院302

主讲人：Rahul Deb（Professor of Economics at Boston College）

主持老师：吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；胡岠（国发院）

参与老师：胡涛，吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；汪浩，胡岠，邢亦青（国发院）；翁翕，刘烁（光华）

题目: Robust Pricing for Cloud Computing

摘要：We study the robust sequential screening problem of a monopolist seller of multiple cloud computing services facing a buyer who has private information about his demand distribution for these services. At the time of contracting, the buyer knows the distribution of his demand of various services and the seller simply knows the mean of the buyer’s total demand. We show that a simple “committed spend mechanism” is robustly optimal: it provides the seller with the highest profit guarantee against all demand distributions that have the known total mean demand. This mechanism requires the buyer to commit to a minimum total usage and a corresponding base payment; the buyer can choose the individual quantities of each service and is free to consume additional units (over the committed total usage) at a fixed marginal price. This result provides theoretical support for prevalent cloud computing pricing practices while highlighting the robustness of simple pricing schemes in environments with complex uncertainty.

主讲人介绍：Rahul Deb is a Professor of Economics at Boston College. He holds a PhD in economics from Yale University and previously was a Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. He is an Associate Editor at Theoretical Economics and a member of the Board of Editors at the American Economic Review Insights. He has published papers in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies and Theoretical Economics.