Publications
Sort:
Open Access Issue
Power of Second Opportunity: Dynamic Pricing with Second Chance
Tsinghua Science and Technology 2025, 30(2): 543-560
Published: 09 December 2024
Abstract PDF (6.3 MB) Collect
Downloads:10

In this paper, we consider the following dynamic pricing problem. Suppose the market price vt of an item arriving at time t is determined by vt=θTxt, where xt is the feature vector of that item and θ is an unknown vector parameter. The seller has to post prices without knowing θ such that the total regret in time span T is minimized. Considering real-world scenarios in which people may negotiate prices, we propose a model called Second Chance Pricing, in which a seller has a second opportunity to post a price after the first offer is declined. Theoretical analysis shows that a second chance of pricing results in a total regret between O(lnTnlnn+1n) and O(n2lnT), where n is the dimension of the feature space. Experiments on both synthetic data and real data demonstrate significant benefits brought about by the second chance where the regret is only 13% of that of one chance.

Total 1