Raju, C. V. L., Yadati, N. and Ravikumar, K. (2006) Learning dynamic prices in electronic retail markets with customer segmentation. In: Annals of Operations Research: International Conference of OR for Development (ICORD 2002). Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 59-75. ISSN 0254-5330 (Print), 1572-9338 (Online) (doi:10.1007/s10479-006-7372-3)

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Abstract

In this paper, we use reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to determine dynamic prices in an electronic monopolistic retail market. The market that we consider consists of two natural segments of customers, captives and shoppers. Captives are mature, loyal buyers whereas the shoppers are more price sensitive and are attracted by sales promotions and volume discounts. The seller is the learning agent in the system and uses RL to learn from the environment. Under (reasonable) assumptions about the arrival process of customers, inventory replenishment policy, and replenishment lead time distribution, the system becomes a Markov decision process thus enabling the use of a wide spectrum of learning algorithms. In this paper, we use the Q-learning algorithm for RL to arrive at optimal dynamic prices that optimize the seller’s performance metric (either long term discounted profit or long run average profit per unit time). Our model and methodology can also be used to compute optimal reorder quantity and optimal reorder point for the inventory policy followed by the seller and to compute the optimal volume discounts to be offered to the shoppers.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Title of Proceedings:	Annals of Operations Research: International Conference of OR for Development (ICORD 2002)
Additional Information:	[1] Copyright: © Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Electronic retail market, Dynamic pricing,Customer segmentation, Captives, Shoppers, Volume discounts, Inventory replenishment, Markov decision process·Reinforcement learning·Q-learning
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HF Commerce H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business > Department of Accounting & Finance Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 09:32
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13362

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