Simple Pricing Schemes for the Cloud

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 in order for the guarantees to hold. In this paper, 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.