English

Robust Discrete Pricing Optimization via Multiple-Choice Knapsack Reductions

Optimization and Control 2026-03-20 v1

Abstract

We study a discrete portfolio pricing problem that selects one price per product from a finite menu under margin and fairness constraints. To account for demand uncertainty, we incorporate a budgeted robust formulation that controls conservatism while remaining computationally tractable. By reducing the problem to a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP), we identify structural properties of the LP relaxation, in particular upper-hull filtering and greedy filling over hull segments, that yield an exact solution method for the LP relaxation of the fixed-parameter subproblems. For the resulting fixed-parameter subproblems, we show that the integrality gap is bounded additively by a single-item hull jump, and that the corresponding relative gap decays as O(1/n) under standard boundedness and linear-growth assumptions. Numerical experiments on synthetic portfolios and a stylized retail case study with economically calibrated parameters are consistent with these bounds and indicate that robust margin protection can be achieved with less than 1 percent nominal revenue loss on the instances tested.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.18653,
  title  = {Robust Discrete Pricing Optimization via Multiple-Choice Knapsack Reductions},
  author = {Zi Yuan Eric Shao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18653},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 10 figures. Code available at https://github.com/eric939/robust_mckp

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:27:42.744Z