Dynamic Learning and Pricing with Model Misspecification
研究了卖家在需求模型误设时如何动态定价，提出随机价格冲击算法来估计价格弹性并最大化收益，在时尚零售数据上比竞品算法多赚8%-20%收入。
We study a multiperiod dynamic pricing problem with contextual information, where the seller uses a misspecified demand model. The seller sequentially observes past demand, updates model parameters, and then chooses the price for the next period based on time-varying features. We show that model misspecification leads to a correlation between price and prediction error of demand per period, which, in turn, leads to inconsistent price elasticity estimates and hence suboptimal pricing decisions. We propose a “random price shock” (RPS) algorithm that dynamically generates randomized price shocks to estimate price elasticity, while maximizing revenue. We show that the RPS algorithm has strong theoretical performance guarantees, that it is robust to model misspecification, and that it can be adapted to a number of business settings, including (1) when the feasible price set is a price ladder and (2) when the contextual information is not IID. We also perform offline simulations to gauge the performance of RPS on a large fashion retail data set and find that is expected to earn 8%–20% more revenue on average than competing algorithms that do not account for price endogeneity. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.