Article ID: | iaor20101082 |
Volume: | 58 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 16 |
End Page Number: | 29 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2010 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Van Roy Benjamin, Farias Vivek F |
Keywords: | pricing |
We study a problem of dynamic pricing faced by a vendor with limited inventory, uncertain about demand, and aiming to maximize expected discounted revenue over an infinite time horizon. The vendor learns from purchase data, so his strategy must take into account the impact of price on both revenue and future observations. We focus on a model in which customers arrive according to a Poisson process of uncertain rate, each with an independent, identically distributed reservation price. Upon arrival, a customer purchases a unit of inventory if and only if his reservation price equals or exceeds the vendor's prevailing price.