Related papers: The Optimality of Constant Mark-Up Pricing

The effectiveness of utility-maximization techniques for portfolio management relies on our ability to estimate correctly the parameters of the dynamics of the underlying financial assets. In the setting of complete or incomplete financial…

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing with limited supply. A seller has $k$ identical items for sale and is facing $n$ potential buyers ("agents") that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each…

With the rapid growth in the fashion e-commerce industry, it is becoming extremely challenging for the E-tailers to set an optimal price point for all the products on the platform. By establishing an optimal price point, they can maximize…

Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…

This paper deals with nonlinear mechanics of an elevator brake system subjected to uncertainties. A deterministic model that relates the braking force with uncertain parameters is deduced from mechanical equilibrium conditions. In order to…

We consider the setting in which an electric power utility seeks to curtail its peak electricity demand by offering a fixed group of customers a uniform price for reductions in consumption relative to their predetermined baselines. The…

The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be…

This paper studies dynamic monopoly pricing for a broad class of settings that allow for multiple durable, multiple rental, or a mix of varieties. We show that the driving force behind pricing dynamics is the existence of trading-up…

In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…

A firm that sells a non perishable product considers intertemporal price discrimination in the objective of maximizing its long-run average revenue. We consider a general model of patient customers with changing valuations. Arriving…

Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…

Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…

We compare the profit of the optimal third-degree price discrimination policy against a uniform pricing policy. A uniform pricing policy offers the same price to all segments of the market. Our main result establishes that for a broad class…

This paper presents an axiomatic approach to finite Markov decision processes where the discount rate is zero. One of the principal difficulties in the no discounting case is that, even if attention is restricted to stationary policies, a…

This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…

We study common properties of retail pricing models within a general framework of calculus of variations. In particular, we observe that for any demand model, optimal de-seasoned revenue rate divided by price elasticity is time invariant.…

We study an optimal stopping problem with an unbounded, time-dependent and discontinuous reward function. This problem is motivated by the pricing of a variable annuity contract with guaranteed minimum maturity benefit, under the assumption…

We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…

We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…

We consider a package assignment problem with multiple units of indivisible items. The seller can specify preferences over partitions of their supply between buyers as packaging costs. We propose incremental costs together with a graph that…