研究定价系统中公平性如何影响消费者福利,提出更优的公平干预时机。
Learning Fair Demand Models
- 在需求估计或价格优化阶段直接施加公平约束
- 当市场大小相近时,估计阶段公平可提升消费者利益
- 罗尔斯式公平下两种策略效果相同,适合关注社会公平者
数据驱动定价在航空、信贷、保险和零售等领域广泛应用。通过学习客户特征对应的需求模型并据此定价,可能产生歧视性结果,引发公平性担忧。本文研究一个两阶段定价流程:先用线性需求模型估计需求,再进行价格优化。在平等主义与罗尔斯主义两种公平视角下,考察在训练损失、价格或需求中引入公平性的效果。发现对不同群体等化训练损失会带来多重解,可能导致不良后果;而直接在价格或需求上施加公平约束更具优势。对于平等主义公平,在市场大小与数据集价格相似时,于估计阶段施加价格公平更利消费者;于优化阶段施加需求公平则能更好保护消费者。在罗尔斯主义下,两种策略完全一致。模型进一步扩展至非线性需求函数,并基于真实疫苗定价数据开展案例分析。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Data-driven pricing is increasingly prevalent in sectors such as airlines, lending, insurance, and retail. By learning demand models from customer features and setting prices accordingly, these systems may generate discriminatory outcomes that raise fairness concerns. This leads to fundamental questions - how and where should systems incorporate fairness considerations in the pricing pipeline, and how does it ultimately affect societal outcomes? To answer these, we study a stylized model where a seller has a two-stage decision pipeline comprising linear demand model estimation followed by price optimization. The seller considers fairness notions in training loss, price, and demand, under both parity-wise and Rawlsian perspectives. We show that equalizing training loss across consumer groups leads to multiple solutions, which in turn can result in undesirable outcomes despite being a standard approach in fair machine learning. Focusing instead on fairness applied directly to prices or demand, we compare two strategies that enforce fairness in either the demand estimation stage or the price optimization stage. For parity-wise fairness, we characterize when each strategy yields higher social welfare under small fairness levels. We show that when market sizes and prices in the dataset are similar, imposing price fairness in the estimation stage is more beneficial to consumers, whereas imposing demand fairness in the optimization stage yields better consumer outcomes. For Rawlsian fairness, the two strategies coincide exactly. Lastly, we extend our model to alternate demand functions and conduct a case study using real-world vaccine pricing data.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。