Real-Time Dynamic Pricing with Minimal and Flexible Price Adjustment
研究卖方在有限库存和销售期内，如何通过一种计算简单、仅需少量且不频繁的价格调整的启发式方法，实现强劲收益表现，并应对业务约束带来的灵活性不足问题。
We study a standard dynamic pricing problem where the seller (a monopolist) possesses a finite amount of inventories and attempts to sell the products during a finite selling season. Despite the potential benefits of dynamic pricing, many sellers still adopt a static pricing policy because of (1) the complexity of frequent reoptimizations, (2) the negative perception of excessive price adjustments, and (3) the lack of flexibility caused by existing business constraints. In this paper, we develop a family of pricing heuristics that can be used to address all these challenges. Our heuristic is computationally easy to implement; it requires only a single optimization at the beginning of the selling season and automatically adjusts the prices over time. Moreover, to guarantee a strong revenue performance, the heuristic only needs to adjust the prices of a small number of products and do so infrequently. This property helps the seller focus his effort on the prices of the most important products instead of all products. In addition, in the case where not all products are equally admissible to price adjustment (due to existing business constraints such as contractual agreement, strategic product positioning, etc.), our heuristic can immediately substitute the price adjustment of the original products with the price adjustment of similar products and maintain an equivalent revenue performance. This property provides the seller with extra flexibility in managing his prices. This paper was accepted by Noah Gans, stochastic models and simulation.