Context‐based dynamic pricing with online clustering. Issue 9 (12th July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Miao, Sentao; Chen, Xi; Chao, Xiuli; Liu, Jiaxi; Zhang, Yidong
• Is Part Of: Production and operations management. Volume 31:Issue 9(2022)
• Page Start: 3559
• Page End: 3575
• Publication Date: 2022-07-12
• Subjects: dynamic pricing -- low‐sale product -- online clustering -- regret analysis; Production management -- Periodicals; 658.505
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.13783
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1059-1478

Abstract

Abstract: We consider a context‐based dynamic pricing problem of online products, which have low sales. Sales data from Alibaba, a major global online retailer, illustrate the prevalence of low‐sale products. For these products, existing single‐product dynamic pricing algorithms do not work well due to insufficient data samples. To address this challenge, we propose pricing policies that concurrently perform clustering over product demand and set individual pricing decisions on the fly. By clustering data and identifying products that have similar demand patterns, we utilize sales data from products within the same cluster to improve demand estimation for better pricing decisions. We evaluate the algorithms using regret, and the result shows that when product demand functions come from multiple clusters, our algorithms significantly outperform traditional single‐product pricing policies. Numerical experiments using a real data set from Alibaba demonstrate that the proposed policies, compared with several benchmark policies, increase the revenue. The results show that online clustering is an effective approach to tackling dynamic pricing problems associated with low‐sale products.