讲座题目：ROBUST PRICING FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

面向对象：面向全院师生

主讲嘉宾：Rahul Deb（波士顿学院 教授）

学科方向：数字经济

讲座时间：2025年5月19日（周一）下午15:00- 16:30

讲座地点：经济学院402室

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.

嘉宾介绍：

Rahul Deb是波士顿学院经济学教授。他拥有耶鲁大学经济学博士学位，曾任多伦多大学经济学教授。他是Theoretical Economics的副主编，也是American Economic Review Insights的编辑委员会成员。他曾在American Economic Review、Econometrica、The Journal of Political Economy、The Review of Economic Studies和Theoretical Economics上发表论文。

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.