Constrained Pricing in Choice-based Revenue Management

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shao, Qian, Mai, Tien, Cheng, Shih-Fen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shao, Qian
Mai, Tien
Cheng, Shih-Fen
author_facet Shao, Qian
Mai, Tien
Cheng, Shih-Fen
contents We consider a dynamic pricing problem in network revenue management where customer behavior is predicted by a choice model, i.e., the multinomial logit (MNL) model. The problem, even in the static setting (i.e., customer demand remains unchanged over time), is highly non-concave in prices. Existing studies mostly rely on the observation that the objective function is concave in terms of purchasing probabilities, implying that the static pricing problem with linear constraints on purchasing probabilities can be efficiently solved. However, this approach is limited in handling constraints on prices, noting that such constraints could be highly relevant in some real business considerations. To address this limitation, in this work, we consider a general pricing problem that involves constraints on both prices and purchasing probabilities. To tackle the non-concavity challenge, we develop an approximation mechanism that allows solving the constrained static pricing problem through bisection and mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). We further extend the approximation method to the dynamic pricing context. Our approach involves a resource decomposition method to address the curse of dimensionality of the dynamic problem, as well as a MILP approach to solving sub-problems to near-optimality. Numerical results based on generated instances of various sizes indicate the superiority of our approximation approach in both static and dynamic settings.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constrained Pricing in Choice-based Revenue Management
Shao, Qian
Mai, Tien
Cheng, Shih-Fen
Optimization and Control
We consider a dynamic pricing problem in network revenue management where customer behavior is predicted by a choice model, i.e., the multinomial logit (MNL) model. The problem, even in the static setting (i.e., customer demand remains unchanged over time), is highly non-concave in prices. Existing studies mostly rely on the observation that the objective function is concave in terms of purchasing probabilities, implying that the static pricing problem with linear constraints on purchasing probabilities can be efficiently solved. However, this approach is limited in handling constraints on prices, noting that such constraints could be highly relevant in some real business considerations. To address this limitation, in this work, we consider a general pricing problem that involves constraints on both prices and purchasing probabilities. To tackle the non-concavity challenge, we develop an approximation mechanism that allows solving the constrained static pricing problem through bisection and mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). We further extend the approximation method to the dynamic pricing context. Our approach involves a resource decomposition method to address the curse of dimensionality of the dynamic problem, as well as a MILP approach to solving sub-problems to near-optimality. Numerical results based on generated instances of various sizes indicate the superiority of our approximation approach in both static and dynamic settings.
title Constrained Pricing in Choice-based Revenue Management
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01764