Simple Policies for Dynamic Pricing with Imperfect Forecasts

Abstract

We consider the “classical” single-product dynamic pricing problem allowing the “scale” of demand intensity to be modulated by an exogenous “market size” stochastic process. This is a natural model of dynamically changing market conditions. We show that for a broad family of Gaussian market-size processes, simple dynamic pricing rules that are essentially agnostic to the specification of this market-size process perform provably well. The pricing policies we develop are shown to compensate for forecast imperfections (or a lack of forecast information altogether) by frequent reoptimization and reestimation of the “instantaneous” market size.