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Simple Pricing Schemes for the Cloud

Authors:

Warut SuksompongAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC), Volume 7, Issue 2

Article No.: 7, Pages 1 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/3327973

Published: 10 June 2019 Publication History

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Abstract

The problem of pricing the cloud has attracted much recent attention due to the widespread use of cloud computing and cloud services. From a theoretical perspective, several mechanisms that provide strong efficiency or fairness guarantees and desirable incentive properties have been designed. However, these mechanisms often rely on a rigid model, with several parameters needing to be precisely known for the guarantees to hold. In this article, we consider a stochastic model and show that it is possible to obtain good welfare and revenue guarantees with simple mechanisms that do not make use of the information on some of these parameters. In particular, we prove that a mechanism that sets the same price per timestep for jobs of any length achieves at least 50% of the welfare and revenue obtained by a mechanism that can set different prices for jobs of different lengths, and the ratio can be improved if we have more specific knowledge of some parameters. Similarly, a mechanism that sets the same price for all servers even though the servers may receive different kinds of jobs can provide a reasonable welfare and revenue approximation compared to a mechanism that is allowed to set different prices for different servers.

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Cited By

Lin LCheung A(2023)Pricing cloud stocks: Evidence from ChinaAccounting & Finance10.1111/acfi.1316264:1(811-832)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.13162
Mishra PMoustafa A(2023)Reinforcement learning based monotonic policy for online resource allocationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2021.09.023138:C(313-327)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.future.2021.09.023
Lin LCheung A(2022)Cloud economy and its relationship with China’s economy—a capital market-based approachFinancial Innovation10.1186/s40854-022-00350-98:1Online publication date: 19-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-022-00350-9
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Simple Pricing Schemes for the Cloud
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles
        Cloud computing
2. Theory of computation
  1. Theory and algorithms for application domains
    1. Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design
      1. Algorithmic mechanism design
      2. Computational pricing and auctions

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation

ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation Volume 7, Issue 2

May 2019

170 pages

ISSN:2167-8375

EISSN:2167-8383

DOI:10.1145/3340299

Editors:
David Pennock
Microsoft
,
Ilya Segal
Stanford University

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 June 2019

Accepted: 01 April 2019

Revised: 01 January 2019

Received: 01 January 2018

Published in TEAC Volume 7, Issue 2

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Cited By

Lin LCheung A(2023)Pricing cloud stocks: Evidence from ChinaAccounting & Finance10.1111/acfi.1316264:1(811-832)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.13162
Mishra PMoustafa A(2023)Reinforcement learning based monotonic policy for online resource allocationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2021.09.023138:C(313-327)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.future.2021.09.023
Lin LCheung A(2022)Cloud economy and its relationship with China’s economy—a capital market-based approachFinancial Innovation10.1186/s40854-022-00350-98:1Online publication date: 19-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-022-00350-9
Hummel PSchwarz MPennock DSegal ISeuken S(2022)Efficient Capacity Provisioning for Firms with Multiple Locations: The Case of the Public CloudProceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation10.1145/3490486.3538281(1018-1039)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490486.3538281
Roy AMisra SNait-Abdesselam F(2022)Range-Price Trade-Off in Sensor-Cloud for Provisioning Sensors-as-a-ServiceIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2020.303085110:4(2897-2908)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2020.3030851
Belusso CSawicki SBasto-Fernandes VFrantz RRoos-Frantz F(2022)Selecting services in the cloud: a decision support methodology focused on infrastructure-as-a-service contextThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-021-04248-878:6(7825-7860)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-021-04248-8
Dierks LYokoo M(undefined)When Should Prices Stay Fixed? On the Chances and Limitations of Spot Pricing in Larger MarketsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4246971
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4246971

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