Related papers: Loss Functions for Discrete Contextual Pricing wit…

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…

Loss functions are at the heart of deep learning, shaping how models learn and perform across diverse tasks. They are used to quantify the difference between predicted outputs and ground truth labels, guiding the optimization process to…

Estimating consumer preferences is central to many problems in economics and marketing. This paper develops a flexible framework for learning individual preferences from partial ranking information by interpreting observed rankings as…

This paper illustrates the central role of loss functions in data-driven decision making, providing a comprehensive survey on their influence in cost-sensitive classification (CSC) and reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate how…

Pricing decisions of companies require an understanding of the causal effect of a price change on the demand. When real-life pricing experiments are infeasible, data-driven decision-making must be based on alternative data sources such as…

This paper deals with the problem of accurately determining guaranteed suboptimal values of an unknown cost function on the basis of noisy measurements. We consider a set-valued variant to regression where, instead of finding a best…

In lending, where prices are specific to both customers and products, having a well-functioning personalized pricing policy in place is essential to effective business making. Typically, such a policy must be derived from observational…

Data-driven sequential decision has found a wide range of applications in modern operations management, such as dynamic pricing, inventory control, and assortment optimization. Most existing research on data-driven sequential decision…

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an important task for the companies to recommend products which better match user preferences. User behavior in digital advertising is dynamic and changes over time. It is crucial for the companies to…

Quantitative trading strategies rely on accurately ranking stocks to identify profitable investments. Effective portfolio management requires models that can reliably order future stock returns. Transformer models are promising for…

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Information discounting plays an important role in the theory of belief functions and, generally, in information fusion. Nevertheless, neither classical uniform discounting nor contextual cannot model certain use cases, notably temporal…

In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…

We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…

In this paper, we introduce a model that adds a non-linearity to discounting: the discounting factor may depend on the notional (i.e., discounted values are no longer linear in the notional). In the first part of the paper, we provide a…

Classification is a well-studied machine learning task which concerns the assignment of instances to a set of outcomes. Classification models support the optimization of managerial decision-making across a variety of operational business…

It can be profitable for vehicle service providers to set service prices based on users' travel demand on different origin-destination pairs. The prior studies on the spatial pricing of vehicle service rely on the assumption that providers…

Real-world systems often involve some pool of users choosing between a set of services. With the increase in popularity of online learning algorithms, these services can now self-optimize, leveraging data collected on users to maximize some…

Recent work on policy learning from observational data has highlighted the importance of efficient policy evaluation and has proposed reductions to weighted (cost-sensitive) classification. But, efficient policy evaluation need not yield…