Título:Bounding the Value of Observability for a Dynamic Pricing Problem.

Idioma de la charla: Español.

Abstract: Research on dynamic pricing has been growing during the last four
decades due to its use in practice by a variety of companies as well as the
several model variants that can be considered.  In this work, we consider
the particular pricing problem where a single seller wants to sell one item
to a single buyer along an infi nite time horizon in order to maximize her
expected revenue.The seller pre-commits to the price function over an infi
nite horizon. The buyer has a private value for the item and purchases at
the time when his utility is maximized. In our model, the buyer is more
impatient than the seller and we study how important is to observe the
buyer time arrival in terms of the seller's expected revenue. We prove that
in a very general setting, the expected revenue when the seller observes
the buyer's arrival is at most roughly 3.6 times the expected revenue when
the seller does not know the time when the buyer arrives.