Dynamic pricing and inventory management with demand learning: A bayesian approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2020.105078Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Volatile markets require combining pricing, inventory control and demand learning.

  • Bayesian dynamic programs provide tractable data-driven dynamic decision frameworks.

  • Information state dependent base-stock list-price policies are optimal.

  • Scalable models and dimensionality reduction enable efficient algorithm designs.

  • Demand learning drives lower prices and data-driven inventory control policies.

Abstract

We consider a retail firm selling a durable product in a volatile market where the demand is price-sensitive and random but its distribution is unknown. The firm dynamically replenishes inventory and adjusts prices over time and learns about the demand distribution. Assuming that the demand model is of the multiplicative form and unmet demand is partially backlogged, we take the empirical Bayesian approach to formulate the problem as a stochastic dynamic program. We first identify a set of regularity conditions on demand models and show that the state-dependent base-stock list-price policy is optimal. We next employ the dimensionality reduction approach to separate the scale factor that captures observed demand information from the optimal profit function, which yields a normalized dynamic program that is more tractable. We also analyze the effect of demand learning on the optimal policy using the system without Bayesian update as a benchmark. We further extend our analysis to the case with unobserved lost sales and the case with additive demand.

Keywords

Dynamic pricing
Inventory management
Demand learning
Bayesian dynamic program

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