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Author: Georgia Perakis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50
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Book Description
We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a retailer who does not have any information on the underlying demand for a product. The retailer aims to maximize cumulative revenue collected over a finite time horizon by balancing two objectives: textit{learning} demand and textit{maximizing} revenue. The retailer also seeks to reduce the amount of price experimentation because of the potential costs associated with price changes. Existing literature solves this problem in the case where the unknown demand is parametric. We consider the pricing problem when demand is non-parametric. We construct a pricing algorithm that uses piecewise linear approximations of the unknown demand function and establish when the proposed policy achieves near-optimal rate of regret, tilde{O}( sqrt{T}), while making O( log log T) price changes. Hence, we show considerable reduction in price changes from the previously known mathcal{O}( log T) rate of price change guarantee in the literature. We also perform extensive numerical experiments to show that the algorithm substantially improves over existing methods in terms of the total price changes, with comparable performance on the cumulative regret metric.
Author: Georgia Perakis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50
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Book Description
We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a retailer who does not have any information on the underlying demand for a product. The retailer aims to maximize cumulative revenue collected over a finite time horizon by balancing two objectives: textit{learning} demand and textit{maximizing} revenue. The retailer also seeks to reduce the amount of price experimentation because of the potential costs associated with price changes. Existing literature solves this problem in the case where the unknown demand is parametric. We consider the pricing problem when demand is non-parametric. We construct a pricing algorithm that uses piecewise linear approximations of the unknown demand function and establish when the proposed policy achieves near-optimal rate of regret, tilde{O}( sqrt{T}), while making O( log log T) price changes. Hence, we show considerable reduction in price changes from the previously known mathcal{O}( log T) rate of price change guarantee in the literature. We also perform extensive numerical experiments to show that the algorithm substantially improves over existing methods in terms of the total price changes, with comparable performance on the cumulative regret metric.
Author: Wang Chi Cheung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
In a dynamic pricing problem where the demand function is not known a priori, price experimentation can be used as a demand learning tool. Existing literature usually assumes no constraint on price changes, but in practice sellers often face business constraints that prevent them from conducting extensive experimentation. We consider a dynamic pricing model where the demand function is unknown but belongs to a known finite set. The seller is allowed to make at most m price changes during T periods. The objective is to minimize the worst case regret, i.e., the expected total revenue loss compared to a clairvoyant who knows the demand distribution in advance. We demonstrate a pricing policy that incurs a regret of O(log^(m) T), or m iterations of the logarithm. Furthermore, we describe an implementation at Groupon, a large e-commerce marketplace for daily deals. The field study shows significant impact on revenue and bookings.
Author: Yiwei Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
We consider a firm that sells a single type product on multiple local markets over a finite horizon via dynamically adjusted prices. To prevent price discrimination, prices posted on different local markets at the same time are the same. The entire horizon consists of one or multiple change-points. Each local market's demand function linearly evolves over time between any two consecutive change-points. Each change-point is classified as either a zero-order or a first-order change-point in terms of how smooth the demand function changes at this point. At a zero-order change-point, at least one local market's demand function has an abrupt change. At a first-order change-point, all local markets' demand functions continuously evolve over time, but at least one local market's demand evolution speed has an abrupt change. The firm has no information about any parameter that modulates the demand evolution process before the start of the horizon. The firm aims at finding a pricing policy that yields as much revenue as possible. We show that the regret under any pricing policy is lower bounded by CT^{1/2} with C>0, and the lower bound becomes as worse as CT^{2/3} if at least one change-point is a first-order change-point.We propose a Joint Change-Point Detection and Time-adjusted Upper Confidence Bound (CU) algorithm. This algorithm consists of two components: the change-point detection component and the exploration-exploitation component. In the change-point detection component, the firm uniformly samples each price for one time in each batch of the time interval with the same length. She uses sales data collected at the times that she uniformly samples prices to both detect whether a change occurs and judge whether it is a zero-order or a first-order change if it occurs. In the exploration-exploitation component, the firm implements a time-adjusted upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm between two consecutive detected change-points. Because demand dynamically evolves between two consecutive change-points, we introduce a time factor into the classical UCB algorithm to correct the bias of using historic sales data to estimate demand at present. We show that the CU algorithm achieves the regret lower bounds (up to logarithmic factors).
Author: Erich Schneider
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics, Mathematical
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Author: Yining Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Personalized or contextual pricing is widespread practice in a number of revenue management problems. A pricing algorithm or platform utilizes a user's personal data to make the most profitable pricing decisions that could vary among individuals. In this paper, we study the question of estimating a demand regression model with high-dimensional data, incorporating an unknown, non-parametric pricing function that acts as a confounding term to the demand model because of the involvement of personal data in algorithm's pricing decisions. We propose a high-dimensional instrumental variable regression method which uses properly cen- tered contextual vectors as approximate instruments in a Lasso formulation to mitigate the bias from price confounders. We further propose a de-biased approach based one two-level partition of the price interval from dynamic programming, and show that the de-biased approach typically results in smaller estimation errors. Finally, we corroborate our methodological and theoretical results with numerical studies and propose some questions for future research.
Author: Mr. Nuri Bora Keskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Pricing decisions often involve a tradeoff between learning about customer behavior to increase long-term revenues, and earning short-term revenues. In this thesis we examine that tradeoff. Whenever a firm is not certain about how its customers will respond to price changes, there is an opportunity to use price as a tool for learning about a demand curve. Most firms try to solve the tradeoff between learning and earning by managing these two goals separately. A common practice is to first estimate the parameters of the demand curve, and then choose the optimal price, assuming the parameter estimates are accurate. In this thesis we show that this conventional approach is far from being optimal, running the risk of incomplete learning--a negative statistical outcome in which the decision maker stops learning prematurely. We also propose several remedies to avoid the incomplete learning problem, and guard against poor performance. In Chapter 1, we model a learn-and-earn problem using a theoretical framework in which a seller has a prior belief about the demand curve for its product, and updates his belief upon observing customer responses to successive sales attempts. We assume that the seller's prior is a binary distribution, i.e. one of two demand curves is known to apply, although our analysis can be extended to any finite prior. In this setting, we first analyze the myopic Bayesian policy (MBP), which is a stylized representative of the estimate-and-then-optimize policies described above. Our analysis makes three contributions to the literature: first, we show that under the MBP the seller's beliefs can get stuck at a confounding value, leading to poor revenue performance. This result elucidates incomplete learning as a consequence of myopic pricing. Our second contribution is the development of a constrained variant of the MBP as a way to tweak the MBP in the binary-prior setting. By forbidding prices that are not sufficiently informative, constrained MBP (CMBP) avoids the incomplete learning problem entirely, and moreover, its expected performance gap relative to a clairvoyant who iv knows the underlying demand curve is bounded by a constant independent of the sales horizon. Finally, we generalize the CMBP family to obtain more flexible pricing policies that are suitable in case the seller has an arbitrary prior on model parameters. The incomplete learning result and the pricing policies we design have a practical significance. Because firms have no means to check whether they are suffering from incomplete learning, the myopic policies used in practice need to be modified with some kind of forced price experimentation, and our policies provide guidelines on how price experimentation can be employed to prevent incomplete learning. In Chapter 2, we consider several research questions: for example, when a seller has been charging an incumbent price for a very long time, how can he make use of the information contained in that incumbent price? Or, when a seller offers multiple products with substitutable demand, can he safely employ an independent price experimentation strategy for each product? More importantly, what if the particular pricing policies in literature are not feasible in a given business setting? To handles such cases, can we derive general principles that identify the essential ingredient of successful price experimentation policies? We address these questions using a fairly general dynamic pricing model, where a monopolist sells a set of products over a given time horizon. The expected demand for products is given by a linear curve, the parameters of which are not known by the seller. The seller's goal is to learn the parameters of the demand curve as he keeps trying to earn revenues. This chapter makes four main contributions to the learning-and-earning literature. First, we formulate an incumbent-price problem, where the seller starts out knowing one point on its demand curve, and show that the value of information contained in the incumbent price is substantial. Second, unlike previous studies that focus on a particular form of price experimentation, we derive general sufficient conditions for accumulating information in a near-optimal manner. We believe that practitioners can use these conditions as guidelines to design successful pricing policies in various settings. Third, we develop a unifying theme to obtain performance bounds in operations management problems with model uncertainty. We employ (i) the concept of Fisher information to derive natural lower bounds on regret, and (ii) martingale theory to analyze the estimation errors and generate well-performing policies. Finally, we analyze the pricing of multiple products with substitutable demand. Our analysis shows that multi-product pricing is not a straightforward repetition of single-product pricing. Learning in a high dimensional price space essentially requires sufficient "variation" in the directions of successive price vectors, which brings forth the idea of orthogonal pricing. In Chapter 3, we extend our analysis to the case where information can become obsolete. The particular dynamic pricing problem we consider includes a seller who tries to simultaneously learn about a time-varying demand curve, and earn sales revenues. We conduct a simulation study to evaluate the revenue performance of several pricing policies in this setting. Our results suggest that policies designed for static demand settings do not perform well in time-varying demand settings. Moreover, if the demand environment is not very noisy and the changes are not very frequent, a simple modification of the estimate-and-then-optimize approach, which is based on a moving time window, performs reasonably well in changing demand environments.
Author: Robert Phillips
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781648
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive introduction to the concepts, theories, and applications of pricing and revenue optimization. From the initial success of "yield management" in the commercial airline industry down to more recent successes of markdown management and dynamic pricing, the application of mathematical analysis to optimize pricing has become increasingly important across many different industries. But, since pricing and revenue optimization has involved the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques, the topic has remained largely inaccessible to students and the typical manager. With methods proven in the MBA courses taught by the author at Columbia and Stanford Business Schools, this book presents the basic concepts of pricing and revenue optimization in a form accessible to MBA students, MS students, and advanced undergraduates. In addition, managers will find the practical approach to the issue of pricing and revenue optimization invaluable. Solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises are available to instructors who are using this book in their courses. For access to the solutions manual, please contact
[email protected].
Author: Victor F. Araman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 46
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Book Description
A retailer is endowed with a finite inventory of a non-perishable product. Demand for this product is driven by a price-sensitive Poisson process that depends on an unknown parameter, theta; a proxy for the market size. If theta is high then the retailer can take advantage of a large market charging premium prices, but if theta is small then price markdowns can be applied to encourage sales. The retailer has a prior belief on the value of theta which he updates as time and available information (prices and sales) evolve. We also assume that the retailer faces an opportunity cost when selling this non-perishable product. This opportunity cost is given by the long-term average discounted profits that the retailer can make if he switches and starts selling a different assortment of products.The retailer's objective is to maximize the discounted long-term average profits of his operation using dynamic pricing policies. We consider two cases. In the first case, the retailer is constrained to sell the entire initial stock of the non-perishable product before a different assortment is considered. In the second case, the retailer is able to stop selling the non-perishable product at any time to switch to a different menu of products. In both cases, the retailer's pricing policy trades-off immediate revenues and future profits based on active demand learning. We formulate the retailer's problem as a (Poisson) intensity control problem and derive structural properties of an optimal solution which we use to propose a simple approximated solution. This solution combines a pricing policy and a stopping rule (if stopping is an option) depending on the inventory position and the retailer's belief about the value of theta. We use numerical computations, together with asymptotic analysis, to evaluate the performance of our proposed solution.
Author: Omar Besbes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 33
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Book Description
Many factors introduce the prospect of changes in the demand environment that a firm faces, with the specifics of such changes not necessarily known in advance. If and when realized, such changes affect the delicate balance between demand and supply and thus current prices should account for these future possibilities. We study the dynamic pricing problem of a retailer facing the prospect of a change in the demand function during a finite selling season with no inventory replenishment opportunity. In particular, the time of the change and the postchange demand function are unknown upfront, and we focus on the fundamental trade-off between collecting revenues from current demand and doing so for postchange demand, with the capacity constraint introducing the main tension. We develop a formulation that allows for isolating the role of dynamic pricing in balancing inventory consumption throughout the horizon. We establish that, in many settings, optimal pricing policies follow a monotone path up to the change in demand. We show how one may compare upfront the attractiveness of pre- and postchange demand conditions and how such a comparison depends on the problem primitives. We further analyze the impact of the model inputs on the optimal policy and its structure, ranging from the impact of model parameter changes to the impact of different representations of uncertainty about future demand.
Author: Mark E. Bergen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In this paper, we argue that pricing is all about price changes, and that the costs of price changes are often simultaneously subtle and substantial. We discuss a framework to deal with the dynamics of changing prices. This framework incorporates customer interpretations of price changes, an awareness of the organizational costs of price changes, investments in future pricing processes, and an understanding of the role that supply chains play in price change strategy. The framework can be used at the tactical level to improve the specific price changes chosen and made, at the managerial level to decide whether or not to make a particular price change at all, and at the strategic level to determine what price adjustment processes should be invested in to improve pricing effectiveness in the future.
