Robust Discrete Pricing Optimization via Multiple-Choice Knapsack Reductions
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.
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