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Non-Stationary Dynamic Pricing Via Actor-Critic Information-Directed Pricing

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  • Po-Yi Liu
  • Chi-Hua Wang
  • Henghsiu Tsai

Abstract

This paper presents a novel non-stationary dynamic pricing algorithm design, where pricing agents face incomplete demand information and market environment shifts. The agents run price experiments to learn about each product's demand curve and the profit-maximizing price, while being aware of market environment shifts to avoid high opportunity costs from offering sub-optimal prices. The proposed ACIDP extends information-directed sampling (IDS) algorithms from statistical machine learning to include microeconomic choice theory, with a novel pricing strategy auditing procedure to escape sub-optimal pricing after market environment shift. The proposed ACIDP outperforms competing bandit algorithms including Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and Thompson sampling (TS) in a series of market environment shifts.

Suggested Citation

  • Po-Yi Liu & Chi-Hua Wang & Henghsiu Tsai, 2022. "Non-Stationary Dynamic Pricing Via Actor-Critic Information-Directed Pricing," Papers 2208.09372, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2208.09372
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Omar Besbes & Assaf Zeevi, 2009. "Dynamic Pricing Without Knowing the Demand Function: Risk Bounds and Near-Optimal Algorithms," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 57(6), pages 1407-1420, December.
    4. Daniel Russo & Benjamin Van Roy, 2014. "Learning to Optimize via Posterior Sampling," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 39(4), pages 1221-1243, November.
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