用贝叶斯优化动态定价,无需假设需求函数形式
Bayesian Optimization for Dynamic Pricing and Learning
- 将需求函数视为价格的黑箱,用高斯过程建模并优化
- 在无限和有限库存场景下均实现更高收益,且理论可证明学习效率
- 适合对模型假设敏感的复杂定价场景,如电商、共享经济
动态定价通过调整产品售价以最大化企业收益,核心挑战在于需求函数(销量如何随价格变化)未知,需从数据中学习。传统方法常假设需求函数具有特定参数形式,虽可用强化学习求解近优策略,但现实中假设可能不成立。本文提出基于高斯过程的非参数化动态定价方法,将需求函数视为价格的黑箱,采用贝叶斯优化(BO)进行样本高效的未知函数优化。针对无限库存与有限库存两种情形,分别设计了适配的BO算法,并给出了两类场景下的后悔界,量化了学习效率。大量实验表明,所提方法在收益上优于多个前沿强化学习算法,同时减少模型假设,增强鲁棒性。这表明贝叶斯优化是复杂不确定环境下动态定价的强大实用工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Dynamic pricing is the practice of adjusting the selling price of a product to maximize a firm's revenue by responding to market demand. The literature typically distinguishes between two settings: infinite inventory, where the firm has unlimited stock and time to sell, and finite inventory, where both inventory and selling horizon are limited. In both cases, the central challenge lies in the fact that the demand function -- how sales respond to price -- is unknown and must be learned from data. Traditional approaches often assume a specific parametric form for the demand function, enabling the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to identify near-optimal pricing strategies. However, such assumptions may not hold in real-world scenarios, limiting the applicability of these methods. In this work, we propose a Gaussian Process (GP) based nonparametric approach to dynamic pricing that avoids restrictive modeling assumptions. We treat the demand function as a black-box function of the price and develop pricing algorithms based on Bayesian Optimization (BO) -- a sample-efficient method for optimizing unknown functions. We present BO-based algorithms tailored for both infinite and finite inventory settings and provide regret guarantees for both regimes, thereby quantifying the learning efficiency of our methods. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our BO-based methods outperform several state-of-the-art RL algorithms in terms of revenue, while requiring fewer assumptions and offering greater robustness. This highlights Bayesian Optimization as a powerful and practical tool for dynamic pricing in complex, uncertain environments.
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