English

Dynamic Pricing with Adversarially-Censored Demands

Machine Learning 2026-01-26 v2 Machine Learning Econometrics Optimization and Control

Abstract

We study an online dynamic pricing problem where the potential demand at each time period t=1,2,,Tt=1,2,\ldots, T is stochastic and dependent on the price. However, a perishable inventory is imposed at the beginning of each time tt, censoring the potential demand if it exceeds the inventory level. To address this problem, we introduce a pricing algorithm based on the optimistic estimates of derivatives. We show that our algorithm achieves O~(T)\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}) optimal regret even with adversarial inventory series. Our findings advance the state-of-the-art in online decision-making problems with censored feedback, offering a theoretically optimal solution against adversarial observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.06168,
  title  = {Dynamic Pricing with Adversarially-Censored Demands},
  author = {Jianyu Xu and Yining Wang and Xi Chen and Yu-Xiang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06168},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:38:08.432Z