Personalized dynamic pricing with machine learning: high-dimensional features and heterogeneous elasticity
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Accepted version
Author(s)
Ban, Gah-Yi
Keskin, N Bora
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We consider a seller who can dynamically adjust the price of a product at the individual customer level, by utilizing information about customers’ characteristics encoded as a d-dimensional feature vector. We assume a personalized demand model, parameters of which depend on s out of the d features. The seller initially does not know the relationship between the customer features and the product demand but learns this through sales observations over a selling horizon of T periods. We prove that the seller’s expected regret, that is, the revenue loss against a clairvoyant who knows the underlying demand relationship, is at least of order S√T under any admissible policy. We then design a near-optimal pricing policy for a semiclairvoyant seller (who knows which s of the d features are in the demand model) who achieves an expected regret of order S√T log T. We extend this policy to a more realistic setting, where the seller does not know the true demand predictors, and show that this policy has an expected regret of order S√T (log d + log T , which is also near-optimal. Finally, we test our theory on simulated data and on a data set from an online auto loan company in the United States. On both data sets, our experimentation-based pricing policy is superior to intuitive and/or widely-practiced customized pricing methods, such as myopic pricing and segment-then-optimize policies. Furthermore, our policy improves upon the loan company’s historical pricing decisions by 47% in expected revenue over a six-month period.
Date Issued
2021-09
Date Acceptance
2020-03-20
Citation
Management Science, 2021, 67 (9), pp.5549-5568
ISSN
0025-1909
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences
Start Page
5549
End Page
5568
Journal / Book Title
Management Science
Volume
67
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2021, INFORMS
Identifier
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3680
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-06-30