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Record W4206466835 · doi:10.1287/msom.2021.1055

Distribution-Free Pricing

2022· article· en· W4206466835 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueManufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicSupply Chain and Inventory Management
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBundleUpper and lower boundsHeuristicsMathematical optimizationComputer scienceNewsvendor modelProfit (economics)MathematicsMathematical economicsEconomicsMicroeconomicsSupply chainMarketingBusiness

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Problem definition: We study a monopolistic robust pricing problem in which the seller does not know the customers’ valuation distribution for a product but knows its mean and variance. Academic/practical relevance: This minimal requirement for information means that the pricing managers only need to be able to answer two questions: How much will your targeted customers pay on average? To measure your confidence in the previous answer, what is the standard deviation of customer valuations? Methodology: We focus on the maximin profit criterion and derive distribution-free upper and lower bounds on the profit function. Results: By maximizing the tight profit lower bound, we obtain the optimal robust price in closed form as well as its distribution-free, worst-case performance bound. We then extend the single-product result to study the robust pure bundle pricing problem where the seller only knows the mean and variance of each product, and we provide easily verifiable, distribution-free, sufficient conditions that guarantee the pure bundle to be more robustly profitable than à la carte (i.e., separate) sales. We further derive a distribution-free, worst-case performance guarantee for a heuristic scheme in which customers choose between buying either a single product or a pure bundle. Moreover, we generalize separate sales and pure bundling to a scheme called clustered bundling that imposes a price for each part (i.e., cluster) of a partition of all products and allows customers to choose one or multiple parts (i.e., clusters), and we provide various algorithms to compute clustered bundling heuristics. In parallel, most of our results hold for the minimax relative regret criterion as well. Managerial implications: The robust price for a single product is in closed form under the maximin profit or minimax relative regret criterion and hence, is easily computable. Its interpretation can be easily explained to pricing managers. We also provide efficient algorithms to compute various mixed bundling heuristics for the multiproduct problem.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.781
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.201
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it