Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
addClaim

Provably Near-Optimal Simple Markdown Readjustment Pricing Policies

Authors: Yiwei Chen; Stefanus Jasin;

Provably Near-Optimal Simple Markdown Readjustment Pricing Policies

Abstract

We consider a canonical revenue management problem wherein a monopolist seller seeks to maximize expected total revenues from selling a fixed inventory of a product to customers who arrive sequentially over time, and the seller is restricted to implement a pricing policy that is non-increasing over time (i.e., markdown pricing). Gallego and van Ryzin (1994) show that the simplest non-increasing price policy, the fixed price policy, is asymptotically optimal in the high-volume regime where both the seller's initial inventory and the length of the selling horizon are proportionally scaled. Specifically, the revenue loss of the fixed price policy is O( k^{1/2}), where k is the system's scaling parameter. In the present paper, we present a novel real-time pricing policy. This policy repeatedly updates the fixed price policy in Gallego and van Ryzin (1994) by taking into account the volatility of the historic sales and forcing the price process to be non-increasing over time. We show that if the seller updates the price for only a single time, then the revenue loss of our policy can be arbitrarily close to O( k^{1/3} \ln k). If the seller updates the prices with a frequency O( \ln k / \ln \ln k ), then the revenue loss of our policy can be arbitrarily close to O( ( \ln k )^3 ). These results are novel and show the power of dynamic pricing in the presence of the markdown restriction.

  • BIP!
    Impact byBIP!
    selected citations
    These citations are derived from selected sources.
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    1
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Average
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
1
Average
Average
Average
Upload OA version
Are you the author of this publication? Upload your Open Access version to Zenodo!
It’s fast and easy, just two clicks!