Download or read book Robust Dynamic Pricing with Demand Learning in the Presence of Outlier Customers written by Chen, Xi and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper studies the dynamic pricing problem under model mis-specifi cation settings. To characterize the model mis-specification, we extend the "eps-contamination model | the most fundamental model in robust statistics and machine learning, to the online setting. In particular, for a selling horizon of length T, the online "eps-contamination model assumes that the demands are realized according to a typical unknown demand function only for (1-eps)T periods. For the rest of eps T periods, an outlier purchase can happen with arbitrary demand functions. Under this model, we develop new robust dynamic pricing policies to hedge against outlier purchase behavior. For the dynamic pricing problem, there are two critical prices, the revenue-maximizing price and inventory clearance price, and the optimal price is the larger price. The challenge is that the seller has no information about which price is larger, and the revenues near these two prices behave entirely differently. To address this challenge, we propose robust online policies for both cases when the optimal price is the revenue-maximizing price and when the optimal price is the clearance price, and then develop a meta algorithm that combines these two cases. Our algorithm is a fully adaptive policy that does not require any prior knowledge of the outlier proportion parameter ". Our simulation study shows that our policy outperforms existing policies in the literature.

Download or read book Study of Customer Behavior in a Revenue Management Setting Using Data driven Approaches written by Sareh Nabi-Abdolyousefi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this study is to propose novel dynamic pricing mechanisms in the presence of strategic customers using data-driven approaches. Dynamic pricing is the latest trend in pricing strategies and allows optimal response to real-time demand and supply information. Firms often face uncertainties when making pricing decisions. One of the uncertainties often involved is unknown demand. Therefore, businesses seek to optimize revenue while learning demand and reducing the uncertainty involved in setting prices. Understanding consumer decision-making is another crucial aspect of pricing in revenue management. One of the detrimental effects of dynamic pricing is that it invokes a type of behavior in customers that is referred to as forward-looking, or strategic, in revenue management literature. The strategic customer considers future price decreases, and purchases the product if his or her discounted surplus is higher than the immediate surplus. In chapters 1 and 2, we study a retailer who is pricing dynamically to maximize his expected cumulative revenue. We assume that the retailer has no information regarding expected demand nor the type of customers he is facing, whether they are myopic or strategic in their shopping behavior. In the problem of dynamic pricing under demand uncertainty, we face an inherent trade-off between the exploration involved in learning demand and the exploitation which occurs due to revenue maximization. One way of modeling this trade-off is using the multi-arm bandit modeling approach. Many algorithms have been proposed to solve stochastic multi-arm bandit problems. Our focus is on the Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm which takes a Bayesian approach and was introduced by William R. Thompson. We propose a pricing mechanism called Strategic Thompson Sampling algorithm which is built upon the TS algorithm. Our main contribution in these two chapters is to merge the literature on strategic behavior with the literature on dynamic pricing and demand learning based on the classical multi-arm bandit modeling approach. In these chapters, the retailer is applying our proposed Strategic Thompson Sampling algorithm to learn expected demand in an exploration-versus-exploitation fashion. We start our analysis with a Bernoulli demand scenario in chapter 1 and extend our work to a Normal demand scenario in chapter 2. For both Bernoulli and Normal demand scenarios, we demonstrate numerically that the retailer's long run price offer decreases as the patience level of the strategic customer increases. We further show that the retailer can be better off in terms of his expected cumulative revenue when facing strategic customers. One potential explanation for this observation is the retailer's lower exploration of non-optimal arms in the presence of strategic customers rather than myopic ones. Our intuition is analytically and numerically confirmed for both Bernoulli and Normal demand scenarios. We further provide and compare expected regret bounds on the retailer's expected cumulative revenue for both types of customers. We conclude that the retailer's regret is lower when facing strategic customers as compared to myopic ones. Our objective in chapter 3 is to improve our starting point by building an informative prior and more specifically, an empirical Bayes prior for the Bayesian online learning algorithm that performs binary prediction. The underlying model used in this chapter is a Bayesian Linear Probit (BLIP) model which performs binary classification on a public data set called "Census Income Data Set". Our goal is to build an informative prior using a portion of the training data set and start the BLIP model with the built-in prior rather than the non-informative standard Normal distributions. We further compare the prediction accuracies of the BLIP model with informative and non-informative priors. An empirical Bayes model (Blip with empirical Bayes prior) has been implemented recently in the production system of one of the largest online retailers. The web-lab experiment is currently running.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing with Demand Learning and Reference Effects written by Arnoud den Boer and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We consider a seller's dynamic pricing problem with demand learning and reference effects. We first study the case where customers are loss-averse: they have a reference price that can vary over time, and the demand reduction when the selling price exceeds the reference price dominates the demand increase when the selling price falls behind the reference price by the same amount. Thus, the expected demand as a function of price has a time-varying "kink" and is not differentiable everywhere. The seller neither knows the underlying demand function nor observes the time-varying reference prices. In this setting, we design and analyze a policy that (i) changes the selling price very slowly to control the evolution of the reference price, and (ii) gradually accumulates sales data to balance the tradeoff between learning and earning. We prove that, under a variety of reference-price updating mechanisms, our policy is asymptotically optimal; i.e., its T-period revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant who knows the demand function and the reference-price updating mechanism grows at the smallest possible rate in T. We also extend our analysis to the case of a fixed reference price, and show how reference effects increase the complexity of dynamic pricing with demand learning in this case. Moreover, we study the case where customers are gain-seeking and design asymptotically optimal policies for this case. Finally, we design and analyze an asymptotically optimal statistical test for detecting whether customers are loss-averse or gain-seeking.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing Strategies in the Presence of Demand Shifts written by Omar Besbes and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing and Demand Learning with Limited Price Experimentation written by Wang Chi Cheung and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing Under Demand Uncertainty in the Presence of Strategic Consumers written by Yinhan Meng and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the effect of strategic consumer behavior on pricing, inventory decisions, and inventory release policies of a monopoly retailer selling a single product over two periods facing uncertain demand. We consider the following three-stage two-period dynamic pricing game. In the first stage the retailer sets his inventory level and inventory release policy; in the second stage the retailer faces uncertain demand that consists of both myopic and strategic consumers. The former type of consumers purchase the good if their valuations exceed the posted price, while the latter type of consumers consider future realizations of prices, and hence their future surplus, before deciding when to purchase the good; in the third stage, the retailer releases its remaining inventory according to the release policy chosen in the first stage. Game theory is employed to model strategic decisions in this setting. Each of the strategies available to the players in this setting (the consumers and the retailer) are solved backward to yield the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, which allows us to derive the equilibrium pricing policies. This work provides three primary contributions to the fields of dynamic pricing and revenue management. First, if, in the third stage, inventory is released to clear the market, then the presence of strategic consumers may be beneficial for the retailer. Second, we find the optimal inventory release strategy when retailers have capacity limitation. Lastly, we numerically demonstrate the retailer's optimal decisions of both inventory level and the inventory release strategy. We find that market clearance mechanism and intermediate supply strategy may emerge as the retailers optimal choice.

Download or read book Robust Demand Estimation with Customer Choice Based Models for Sales Transaction Data written by Sanghoon Cho and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As firms come to realize that a traditional one-size-fits-all policy may no longer be effective, they look for more innovative practices such as personalized offerings and even personalized pricing to differentiate their products and services. In such an environment, it becomes critical to understand customer preferences and estimate customer choice among a firm's portfolio of offerings when the prices of those offerings vary over time and sometimes even across different customers. We develop a novel statistical method to estimate the choice probabilities and the size of the no-purchase customer population when transaction data from a single firm's set of products is available. We propose a conditional logit model to fit this data that does not assume a constant arrival rate and allows for choice sets and product attributes that can vary across each customer arrival, unlike existing methods which require some level of aggregation across arrivals and/or choice sets. Customers independently arrive to the system through a non-stationary process to choose a product among several options or choose not to buy any product. Although the parameters of our proposed model can be consistently estimated using conventional maximum likelihood estimation, the no-purchase utility cannot be estimated without further information. We consider two additional types of information for identification of our model parameters: 1) additional assumptions on the customers' utility function, and 2) external information about a firm's market share. We then develop a robust estimation procedure that accounts for inaccuracies in either information type and lets the data determine the best approach. Computational experiments show that our approach provides promising predictions of customer choice behavior when compared with other generally used methods, and clearly outperforms those methods in scenarios where the product prices change frequently over time. Relative to existing approaches for estimating customer choice-based models, our proposed methodology better suits environments employing dynamic pricing and personalized offering practices, such as online retailing.

Download or read book Demand Learning and Dynamic Pricing for Multi Version Products written by Guillermo Gallego and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We consider a capacity provider who offers multiple versions of a single product, such as different seat locations for an event. We assume that the different versions share an unknown core value and command a known premium or discount relative to the core value. Customers arrive at an unknown arrival rate during a finite sales horizon. We assume that the provider has a prior knowledge about the arrival rate which is updated using Bayesian rule. Estimates of the core value are updated using maximum likelihood estimation. We show how to simultaneously estimate the unknown parameters as the sales evolve and how to price the products to maximize revenues under a rolling horizon framework.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing in a Distribution Channel in the Presence of Switching Costs written by Koray Cosguner and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We advance the literature on dynamic oligopoly pricing models in the presence of switching costs by additionally modeling the strategic pricing role of the retailer within the distribution channel. In doing this, we study the relative dynamic pricing implications of how current retail and wholesale prices for a brand must optimally take into account past and future demand, respectively, for the brand. Using scanner data from the cola market, we find that while the retailer exploits the benefit of inertial demand by appropriately increasing the retail profit margin, the cost of investing is borne entirely by the manufacturers. We use simulation studies to show how the retailer will lose its ability to leverage the benefits of inertial demand as consumers become more price sensitive. We also show that when inertia of the more price-sensitive customer segment increases, the aggregate welfare of consumers, the retailer, and manufacturers may increase.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing with Demand Model Uncertainty written by Mr. Nuri Bora Keskin and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book On the Surprising Sufficiency of Linear Models for Dynamic Pricing with Demand Learning written by Omar Besbes and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We consider a multi-period single product pricing problem with an unknown demand curve. The seller's objective is to adjust prices in each period so as to maximize cumulative expected revenues over a given finite time horizon; in doing so, the seller needs to resolve the tension between learning the unknown demand curve and maximizing earned revenues. The main question that we investigate is the following: how large of a revenue loss is incurred if the seller uses a simple parametric model which differs significantly (i.e., is misspecified) relative to the underlying demand curve. This "price of misspecification'' is expected to be significant if the parametric model is overly restrictive. Somewhat surprisingly, we show (under reasonably general conditions) that this may not be the case.

Download or read book Handbook of Marketing Analytics written by Natalie Mizik and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marketing Science contributes significantly to the development and validation of analytical tools with a wide range of applications in business, public policy and litigation support. The Handbook of Marketing Analytics showcases the analytical methods used in marketing and their high-impact real-life applications. Fourteen chapters provide an overview of specific marketing analytic methods in some technical detail and 22 case studies present thorough examples of the use of each method in marketing management, public policy, and litigation support. All contributing authors are recognized authorities in their area of specialty.

Download or read book Foundations of Data Science written by Avrim Blum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of data science, including machine learning, high-dimensional geometry, and analysis of large networks. Topics include the counterintuitive nature of data in high dimensions, important linear algebraic techniques such as singular value decomposition, the theory of random walks and Markov chains, the fundamentals of and important algorithms for machine learning, algorithms and analysis for clustering, probabilistic models for large networks, representation learning including topic modelling and non-negative matrix factorization, wavelets and compressed sensing. Important probabilistic techniques are developed including the law of large numbers, tail inequalities, analysis of random projections, generalization guarantees in machine learning, and moment methods for analysis of phase transitions in large random graphs. Additionally, important structural and complexity measures are discussed such as matrix norms and VC-dimension. This book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses in the design and analysis of algorithms for data.

Download or read book Dynamic Allocation and Pricing written by Alex Gershkov and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to dynamic allocation and pricing that blends dynamic paradigms from the operations research and management science literature with classical mechanism design methods. Dynamic allocation and pricing problems occur in numerous frameworks, including the pricing of seasonal goods in retail, the allocation of a fixed inventory in a given period of time, and the assignment of personnel to incoming tasks. Although most of these problems deal with issues treated in the mechanism design literature, the modern revenue management (RM) literature focuses instead on analyzing properties of restricted classes of allocation and pricing schemes. In this book, Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu propose an approach to optimal allocations and prices based on the theory of mechanism design, adapted to dynamic settings. Drawing on their own recent work on the topic, the authors describe a modern theory of RM that blends the elegant dynamic models from the operations research (OR), management science, and computer science literatures with techniques from the classical mechanism design literature. Illustrating this blending of approaches, they start with well-known complete information, nonstrategic dynamic models that yield elegant explicit solutions. They then add strategic agents that are privately informed and then examine the consequences of these changes on the optimization problem of the designer. Their sequential modeling of both nonstrategic and strategic logic allows a clear picture of the delicate interplay between dynamic trade-offs and strategic incentives. Topics include the sequential assignment of heterogeneous objects, dynamic revenue optimization with heterogeneous objects, revenue maximization in the stochastic and dynamic knapsack model, the interaction between learning about demand and dynamic efficiency, and dynamic models with long-lived, strategic agents.

Download or read book Practical Applications of Sparse Modeling written by Irina Rish and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sparse modeling is a rapidly developing area at the intersection of statistical learning and signal processing, motivated by the age-old statistical problem of selecting a small number of predictive variables in high-dimensional data sets. This collection describes key approaches in sparse modeling, focusing on its applications in such fields as neuroscience, computational biology, and computer vision. Sparse modeling methods can improve the interpretability of predictive models and aid efficient recovery of high-dimensional unobserved signals from a limited number of measurements. Yet despite significant advances in the field, a number of open issues remain when sparse modeling meets real-life applications. The book discusses a range of practical applications and state-of-the-art approaches for tackling the challenges presented by these applications. Topics considered include the choice of method in genomics applications; analysis of protein mass-spectrometry data; the stability of sparse models in brain imaging applications; sequential testing approaches; algorithmic aspects of sparse recovery; and learning sparse latent models"--Jacket.

Download or read book Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators written by Lucian Busoniu and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From household appliances to applications in robotics, engineered systems involving complex dynamics can only be as effective as the algorithms that control them. While Dynamic Programming (DP) has provided researchers with a way to optimally solve decision and control problems involving complex dynamic systems, its practical value was limited by algorithms that lacked the capacity to scale up to realistic problems. However, in recent years, dramatic developments in Reinforcement Learning (RL), the model-free counterpart of DP, changed our understanding of what is possible. Those developments led to the creation of reliable methods that can be applied even when a mathematical model of the system is unavailable, allowing researchers to solve challenging control problems in engineering, as well as in a variety of other disciplines, including economics, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators provides a comprehensive and unparalleled exploration of the field of RL and DP. With a focus on continuous-variable problems, this seminal text details essential developments that have substantially altered the field over the past decade. In its pages, pioneering experts provide a concise introduction to classical RL and DP, followed by an extensive presentation of the state-of-the-art and novel methods in RL and DP with approximation. Combining algorithm development with theoretical guarantees, they elaborate on their work with illustrative examples and insightful comparisons. Three individual chapters are dedicated to representative algorithms from each of the major classes of techniques: value iteration, policy iteration, and policy search. The features and performance of these algorithms are highlighted in extensive experimental studies on a range of control applications. The recent development of applications involving complex systems has led to a surge of interest in RL and DP methods and the subsequent need for a quality resource on the subject. For graduate students and others new to the field, this book offers a thorough introduction to both the basics and emerging methods. And for those researchers and practitioners working in the fields of optimal and adaptive control, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and operations research, this resource offers a combination of practical algorithms, theoretical analysis, and comprehensive examples that they will be able to adapt and apply to their own work. Access the authors' website at www.dcsc.tudelft.nl/rlbook/ for additional material, including computer code used in the studies and information concerning new developments.

Download or read book Making It Big written by Andrea Ciani and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.