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 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 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 The Elements of Joint Learning and Optimization in Operations Management written by Xi Chen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing with Unknown Non Parametric Demand and Limited Price Changes written by Georgia Perakis and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Innovative Technology at the Interface of Finance and Operations written by Volodymyr Babich and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the challenges and opportunities arising from an assortment of technologies as they relate to Operations Management and Finance. It contains primers on operations, finance, and their interface. Innovative technologies and new business models enabled by those technologies are changing the practice and the theory of Operations Management and Finance, as well as their interface. These technologies and business models include Big Data and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT, 3D printing, sharing platforms, crowdfunding, and crowdsourcing. The book will be an attractive choice for PhD-level courses and for self-study.

Download or read book Learning and Intelligent Optimization written by Meinolf Sellmann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-25 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Optimization, LION-17, held in Nice, France, during June 4–8, 2023. The 40 full papers presented have been carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. They focus on all aspects of unleashing the potential of integrating machine learning and optimization approaches, including automatic heuristic selection, intelligent restart strategies, predict-then-optimize, Bayesian optimization, and learning to optimize.

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 Revenue Management and Pricing Analytics written by Guillermo Gallego and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There is no strategic investment that has a higher return than investing in good pricing, and the text by Gallego and Topaloghu provides the best technical treatment of pricing strategy and tactics available.” Preston McAfee, the J. Stanley Johnson Professor, California Institute of Technology and Chief Economist and Corp VP, Microsoft. “The book by Gallego and Topaloglu provides a fresh, up-to-date and in depth treatment of revenue management and pricing. It fills an important gap as it covers not only traditional revenue management topics also new and important topics such as revenue management under customer choice as well as pricing under competition and online learning. The book can be used for different audiences that range from advanced undergraduate students to masters and PhD students. It provides an in-depth treatment covering recent state of the art topics in an interesting and innovative way. I highly recommend it." Professor Georgia Perakis, the William F. Pounds Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This book is an important and timely addition to the pricing analytics literature by two authors who have made major contributions to the field. It covers traditional revenue management as well as assortment optimization and dynamic pricing. The comprehensive treatment of choice models in each application is particularly welcome. It is mathematically rigorous but accessible to students at the advanced undergraduate or graduate levels with a rich set of exercises at the end of each chapter. This book is highly recommended for Masters or PhD level courses on the topic and is a necessity for researchers with an interest in the field.” Robert L. Phillips, Director of Pricing Research at Amazon “At last, a serious and comprehensive treatment of modern revenue management and assortment optimization integrated with choice modeling. In this book, Gallego and Topaloglu provide the underlying model derivations together with a wide range of applications and examples; all of these facets will better equip students for handling real-world problems. For mathematically inclined researchers and practitioners, it will doubtless prove to be thought-provoking and an invaluable reference.” Richard Ratliff, Research Scientist at Sabre “This book, written by two of the leading researchers in the area, brings together in one place most of the recent research on revenue management and pricing analytics. New industries (ride sharing, cloud computing, restaurants) and new developments in the airline and hotel industries make this book very timely and relevant, and will serve as a critical reference for researchers.” Professor Kalyan Talluri, the Munjal Chair in Global Business and Operations, Imperial College, London, UK.

Download or read book Communication Systems and Networks written by Subir Biswas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2018, held in Banaglore, India, in January 2018.The 12 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. They cover various topics in networking and communications systems.

Download or read book Women in Industrial and Systems Engineering written by Alice E. Smith and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a diversity of innovative and impactful research in the field of industrial and systems engineering (ISE) led by women investigators. After a Foreword by Margaret L. Brandeau, an eminent woman scholar in the field, the book is divided into the following sections: Analytics, Education, Health, Logistics, and Production. Also included is a comprehensive biography on the historic luminary of industrial engineering, Lillian Moeller Gilbreth. Each chapter presents an opportunity to learn about the impact of the field of industrial and systems engineering and women’s important contributions to it. Topics range from big data analysis, to improving cancer treatment, to sustainability in product design, to teamwork in engineering education. A total of 24 topics touch on many of the challenges facing the world today and these solutions by women researchers are valuable for their technical innovation and excellence and their non-traditional perspective. Found within each author’s biography are their motivations for entering the field and how they view their contributions, providing inspiration and guidance to those entering industrial engineering.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing with Demand Learning Under Competition written by Carine Anne Marie Simon and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (cont.) Finally, we consider closed-loop strategies in a duopoly market when demand is stochastic. Unlike open-loop policies (such policies are computed once and for all at the beginning of the time horizon), closed loop policies are computed at each time period, so that the firm can take advantage of having observed the past random disturbances in the market. In a closed-loop setting, subgame perfect equilibrium is the relevant notion of equilibrium. We investigate the existence and uniqueness of a subgame perfect equilibrium strategy, as well as approximations of the problem in order to be able to compute such policies more efficiently.

Download or read book Global Supply Chain and Operations Management written by Dmitry Ivanov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this textbook comprehensively discusses global supply-chain and operations management, combining value creation networks and interacting processes. It focuses on the operational roles in the networks and presents the quantitative and organizational methods needed to plan and control the material, information and financial flows in the supply chain. Each chapter starts with an introductory case study, and numerous examples from various industries and services help to illustrate the key concepts. The book explains how to design operations and supply networks and how to incorporate suppliers and customers. It also examines matching supply and demand, which is a core aspect of tactical planning, before turning to the allocation of resources for fulfilling customer demands. This second edition features three new chapters: “Supply Chain Risk Management and Resilience”, “Digital Supply Chain, Smart Operations, and Industry 4.0”, and “Pricing and Revenue-Oriented Capacity Allocation”. These new chapters provide the structured knowledge on the principles, models, and technologies for managing the supply-chain risks and improving supply-chain and operations performance with the help of digital technologies such as Industry 4.0, additive manufacturing, Internet-of-Things, advanced optimization methods and predictive analytics. The existing chapters have been updated and new case studies have been included. In addition, the preface provides guidelines for instructors on how to use the material for different courses in supply-chain and operations management and at different educational levels, such as general undergraduate, specialized undergraduate, and graduate courses. The companion website www.global-supply-chain-management.de has also been updated accordingly. In addition, the book is now supported by e-manuals for supply-chain and operations simulation and optimization in AnyLogic and anyLogistix. Providing readers with a working knowledge of global supply-chain and operations management, with a focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice, this textbook can be used in core, special and advanced classes. It is intended for broad range of students and professionals involved in supply-chain and operations management.

Download or read book Artificial Intelligence in Marketing written by K. Sudhir and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-13 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Review of Marketing Research pushes the boundaries of marketing—broadening the marketing concept to make the world a better place. Here, leading scholars explore how marketing is currently shaping, and being shaped by, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing and Learning written by Daniel Ringbeck and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We consider the problem of offering an optimal price when demand is unknown and must be learned by price experimentation - a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem. In each period, the retailer must decide on a price while using knowledge already acquired to weigh the benefits of exploring other prices versus maximizing revenue. Other algorithms proposed for such problems either learn the price-demand relation for each price separately or determine the parameters of an assumed parametric demand function. We instead combine Gaussian process regression with Thompson sampling as a nonparametric learning algorithm that can learn any functional relation between price and demand. This GP-TS algorithm scales significantly better with the number of price vectors than do existing approaches, yet it makes no restrictive assumptions on the price-demand relationship's functional form. We show how to apply the algorithm to finite inventory settings that consider both single and multiple products and also to settings in which exogenous contextual information can affect prices. One advantage of the algorithm is that its performance depends not on the number of price vectors over all products but only on the number of products considered. For each setting considered here, we benchmark our approach to existing algorithms. The GP-TS algorithm's learning performance is far superior to that of its peers, especially when there are increases in the number of products to learn concurrently. Finally, we propose extensions that enable the application of our algorithm when demand follows a Bernoulli or Poisson distribution.

Download or read book Dynamic Pricing for Non Perishable Products with Demand Learning written by Victor F. Araman and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Data Based Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Control with Censored Demand and Limited Price Changes written by Boxiao Chen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.