Data Based Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Censored Demand and Limited Price Changes

Data Based Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Censored Demand and Limited Price Changes PDF Author: Boxiao Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
A firm makes pricing and inventory replenishment decisions for a product over T periods to maximize its expected total profit. Demand is random and price sensitive, and unsatisfied demands are lost and unobservable (censored demand). The firm knows the demand process up to some parameters and needs to learn them through pricing and inventory experimentation. However, due to business constraints the firm is prevented from making frequent price changes, leading to correlated and dependent sales data. We develop data-driven algorithms by actively experimenting inventory and pricing decisions and construct maximum likelihood estimator with censored and correlated samples for parameter estimation. We analyze the algorithms using the T-period regret, defined as the profit loss of the algorithms over T periods compared with the clairvoyant optimal policy that knew the parameters a priori. For a so-called well-separated case, we show that the regret of our algorithm is O(T^{1/(m+1)}) when the number of price changes is limited by m >= 1, and is O( log T) when limited by beta log T for some positive constant beta>0; while for a more general case, the regret is O(T^{1/2}) when the underlying demand is bounded and O(T^{1/2} log T) when the underlying demand is unbounded. We further prove that our algorithm for each case is the best possible in the sense that its regret rate matches with the theoretical lower bound.

Data Based Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Censored Demand and Limited Price Changes

Data Based Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Censored Demand and Limited Price Changes PDF Author: Boxiao Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
A firm makes pricing and inventory replenishment decisions for a product over T periods to maximize its expected total profit. Demand is random and price sensitive, and unsatisfied demands are lost and unobservable (censored demand). The firm knows the demand process up to some parameters and needs to learn them through pricing and inventory experimentation. However, due to business constraints the firm is prevented from making frequent price changes, leading to correlated and dependent sales data. We develop data-driven algorithms by actively experimenting inventory and pricing decisions and construct maximum likelihood estimator with censored and correlated samples for parameter estimation. We analyze the algorithms using the T-period regret, defined as the profit loss of the algorithms over T periods compared with the clairvoyant optimal policy that knew the parameters a priori. For a so-called well-separated case, we show that the regret of our algorithm is O(T^{1/(m+1)}) when the number of price changes is limited by m >= 1, and is O( log T) when limited by beta log T for some positive constant beta>0; while for a more general case, the regret is O(T^{1/2}) when the underlying demand is bounded and O(T^{1/2} log T) when the underlying demand is unbounded. We further prove that our algorithm for each case is the best possible in the sense that its regret rate matches with the theoretical lower bound.

Optimal Policies for Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Nonparametric Censored Demands

Optimal Policies for Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Nonparametric Censored Demands PDF Author: Boxiao Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We study the fundamental model in joint pricing and inventory replenishment control under the learning-while-doing framework, with T consecutive review periods and the firm not knowing the demand curve a priori. At the beginning of each period, the retailer makes both a price decision and an inventory order-up-to level decision, and collects revenues from consumers' realized demands while suffering costs from either holding unsold inventory items, or lost sales from unsatisfied customer demands. We make the following contributions to this fundamental problem as follows:1. We propose a novel inversion method based on empirical measures to consistently estimate the difference of the instantaneous reward functions at two prices, directly tackling the fundamental challenge brought by censored demands, without raising the order-up-to levels to unnaturally high levels to collect more demand information. Based on this technical innovation, we design bisection and trisection search methods that attain an O(T^{1/2}) regret, assuming the reward function is concave and only twice continuously differentiable.2. In the more general case of non-concave reward functions, we design an active tournament elimination method that attains O(T^{3/5}) regret, based also on the technical innovation of consistent estimates of reward differences at two prices.3. We complement the O(T^{3/5}) regret upper bound with a matching Omega(T^{3/5}) regret lower bound. The lower bound is established by a novel information-theoretical argument based on generalized squared Hellinger distance, which is significantly different from conventional arguments that are based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. This lower bound shows that no learning-while-doing algorithm could achieve O(T^{1/2}) regret without assuming the reward function is concave, even if the sales revenue as a function of demand rate or price is concave.Both the upper bound technique based on the "difference estimator" and the lower bound technique based on generalized Hellinger distance are new in the literature, and can be potentially applied to solve other inventory or censored demand type problems that involve learning.

Dynamic Pricing With Infrequent Inventory Replenishments

Dynamic Pricing With Infrequent Inventory Replenishments PDF Author: Boxiao Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We consider a joint pricing and inventory control problem where pricing can be adjusted more frequently, such as every period, than inventory ordering decisions, which are made every epoch that consists of multiple periods. This is motivated by many examples, especially for online retailers, where price is indeed much easier to change than inventory level, because changing the latter is subject to logistic and capacity constraints. In this setting, the retailer determines the inventory level at the beginning of each epoch and solves a dynamic pricing problem within each epoch with no further replenishment opportunities. The optimal pricing and inventory control policy is characterized by an intricate dynamic programming (DP) solution. We consider the situation where the demand-price function and the distribution of random demand noise are both unknown to the retailer, and the retailer needs to develop an online learning algorithm to learn those information and at the same time maximize total profit. We propose a learning algorithm based on least squares estimation and construction of an empirical noise distribution under a UCB framework and prove that the algorithm converges through the DP recursions to approach the optimal pricing and inventory control policy under complete demand information. The theoretical lower bound for convergence rate of a learning algorithm is proved based on the multivariate Van Trees inequality coupled with some structural DP analyses, and we show that the upper bound of our algorithm's convergence rate matches the theoretical lower bound.

The Elements of Joint Learning and Optimization in Operations Management

The Elements of Joint Learning and Optimization in Operations Management PDF Author: Xi Chen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031019261
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book examines recent developments in Operations Management, and focuses on four major application areas: dynamic pricing, assortment optimization, supply chain and inventory management, and healthcare operations. Data-driven optimization in which real-time input of data is being used to simultaneously learn the (true) underlying model of a system and optimize its performance, is becoming increasingly important in the last few years, especially with the rise of Big Data.

Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Fixed Ordering Cost and Incomplete Demand Information

Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Fixed Ordering Cost and Incomplete Demand Information PDF Author: Boxiao Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
We consider the periodic review dynamic pricing and inventory control problem with fixed ordering cost. Demand is random and price dependent, and unsatisfied demand is backlogged. With complete demand information, the celebrated (s,S,p) policy is proved to be optimal, where s and S are the reorder point and order-up-to level for ordering strategy, and p, a function of on-hand inventory level, characterizes the pricing strategy. In this paper, we consider incomplete demand information and develop online learning algorithms whose average profit approaches that of the optimal (s,S,p) with a tight O ̃(√T) regret rate. A number of salient features differentiate our work from the existing online learning researches in the OM literature. First, computing the optimal (s,S,p) policy requires solving a dynamic programming (DP) over multiple periods involving unknown quantities, which is different from the majority of learning problems in operations management that only require solving single-period optimization questions. It is hence challenging to establish stability results through DP recursions, which we accomplish by proving uniform convergence of the profit-to-go function. The necessity of analyzing action-dependent state transition over multiple periods resembles the reinforcement learning question, considerably more difficult than existing bandit learning algorithms. Second, the pricing function p is of infinite dimension, and approaching it is much more challenging than approaching a finite number of parameters as seen in existing researches. The demand-price relationship is estimated based on upper confidence bound, but the confidence interval cannot be explicitly calculated due to the complexity of the DP recursion. Finally, due to the multi-period nature of (s,S,p) policies the actual distribution of the randomness in demand plays an important role in determining the optimal pricing strategy p, which is unknown to the learner a priori. In this paper, the demand randomness is approximated by an empirical distribution constructed using dependent samples, and a novel Wasserstein metric based argument is employed to prove convergence of the empirical distribution.

Inventory-Based Dynamic Pricing with Costly Price Adjustment

Inventory-Based Dynamic Pricing with Costly Price Adjustment PDF Author: Wen Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
We study an average-cost stochastic inventory control problem in which the firm can replenish inventory and adjust price at anytime. We establish the optimality to change the price from low to high in each replenishment cycle as inventory is depleted. With costly price adjustment, scale economies of inventory replenishment are reflected in the cycle time instead of lot size -- An increased fixed ordering cost leads to an extended replenishment cycle but does not necessarily increase the order quantity. A reduced marginal cost of ordering calls for an increased order quantity, as well as speeding up product selling within a cycle. We derive useful properties of the profit function that allows for reducing computational complexity of the problem. For systems requiring short replenishment cycles, the optimal solution can be easily computed by applying these properties. For systems requiring long replenishment cycles, we further consider a relaxed problem that is computational tractable. Under this relaxation, the sum of fixed ordering cost and price adjustment cost is equal to (greater than, less than) the total inventory holding cost within a replenishment cycle when the inventory holding cost is linear (convex, concave) in the stock level. Moreover, under the optimal solution, the time-average profit is the same across all price segments when the inventory holding cost is accounted properly. Through a numerical study, we demonstrate that inventory-based dynamic pricing can lead to significant profit improvement compared with static pricing and limited price adjustment can yield a benefit that is close to unlimited price adjustment. To be able to enjoy the benefit of dynamic pricing, however, it is important to appropriately choose inventory levels at which the price is revised.

Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control

Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control PDF Author: Elodie Adida
Publisher: VDM Publishing
ISBN: 9783836421430
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
(cont.) We introduce and study a solution method that enables to compute the optimal solution on a finite time horizon in a monopoly setting. Our results illustrate the role of capacity and the effects of the dynamic nature of demand. We then introduce an additive model of demand uncertainty. We use a robust optimization approach to protect the solution against data uncertainty in a tractable manner, and without imposing stringent assumptions on available information. We show that the robust formulation is of the same order of complexity as the deterministic problem and demonstrate how to adapt solution method. Finally, we consider a duopoly setting and use a more general model of additive and multiplicative demand uncertainty. We formulate the robust problem as a coupled constraint differential game. Using a quasi-variational inequality reformulation, we prove the existence of Nash equilibria in continuous time and study issues of uniqueness. Finally, we introduce a relaxation-type algorithm and prove its convergence to a particular Nash equilibrium (normalized Nash equilibrium) in discrete time.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Economy and Computer Application (DECA 2023)

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Economy and Computer Application (DECA 2023) PDF Author: Charles Chen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9464633042
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
This is an open access book. The 3rd International Conference on Digital Economy and Computer Applications (DECA 2023) will be held on September 22–24, 2023 in Shanghai, China. Digital economy is the main economic form after agricultural economy and industrial economy. It takes data resources as the key element, modern information network as the main carrier, and the integration and application of information and communication technology and all-factor digital transformation as the important driving force to promote a new economic form that is more unified in fairness and efficiency. The essence of digital economy is informationization. Informatization is a social and economic process caused by the revolution of production tools, such as computer and Internet, from industrial economy to information economy. The theme of the conference mainly focuses on digital economy and computer applications and other related research fields, aiming to provide an international cooperation and exchange platform for experts and scholars in related research fields and enterprise development personnel to share research results, discuss existing problems and challenges, and explore cutting-edge technologies. We sincerely invite experts and scholars from universities and research institutions at home and abroad, entrepreneurs and other relevant personnel to contribute and participate in the conference. The DECA 2023 is accepting papers for proceeding publication. We accept contributions from those who care about exploring and enhancing the research and innovation in Digital Economy and Computer Applications in the world. The directions of the call for papers are as follows: Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain Technology, Service-Oriented and Cloud, Industry Track, Deliver the Intelligent Enterprise, Mobile business and Autonomous Computing and other papers in line with the direction of digital economy and computer applications. We welcome submissions from scholars, students, and practitioners across many disciplines that contribute to the study and practice of Digital Economy and Computer Applications.

Combined Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control

Combined Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780599594609
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Learning

Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Learning PDF Author: Nicholas C. Petruzzi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description