Hedonic pricing modelling with unstructured predictors: an application to Italian Fashion Industry

This study proposes a comparison of hedonic pricing models that use attributes obtained by featurizing text. We collected prices of items sold on the websites of five famous fashion producers in order to estimate hedonic pricing models that leverage the information contained in product descriptions. We mapped product descriptions to a high-dimensional feature space and compared predictive accuracy and variable selection properties of some statistical estimators that leverage sparse modelling, topic modelling and aggregated predictors, to test whether better predictive accuracy comes with an empirically consistent selection of attributes. We call this approach Hedonic Text-Regression modelling. Its novelty is that by using attributes obtained by text-mining of product descriptions, we obtain an estimate of the implicit price of the words contained therein. Empirically, all the proposed models outperformed the traditional hedonic pricing model in terms of predictive accuracy, while also providing consistent variable selection.