Processing math: 100%
Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Towards Agnostic Feature-based Dynamic Pricing: Linear Policies vs Linear Valuation with Unknown Noise

Jianyu Xu · Yu-Xiang Wang

Virtual

Abstract: In feature-based dynamic pricing, a seller sets appropriate prices for a sequence of products (described by feature vectors) on the fly by learning from the binary outcomes of previous sales sessions ("Sold" if valuation price, and "Not Sold" otherwise). Existing works either assume noiseless linear valuation or precisely-known noise distribution, which limits the applicability of those algorithms in practice when these assumptions are hard to verify. In this work, we study two more agnostic models: (a) a "linear policy" problem where we aim at competing with the best linear pricing policy while making no assumptions on the data, and (b) a "linear noisy valuation" problem where the random valuation is linear plus an unknown and assumption-free noise. For the former model, we show a Θ(d1/3T2/3) minimax regret up to logarithmic factors. For the latter model, we present an algorithm that achieves an O(T3/4) regret and improve the best-known lower bound from Omega(T3/5) to Ω(T2/3). These results demonstrate that no-regret learning is possible for feature-based dynamic pricing under weak assumptions, but also reveal a disappointing fact that the seemingly richer pricing feedback is not significantly more useful than the bandit-feedback in regret reduction.

Chat is not available.