Seminar: Dynamic Pricing with Varying Cost
Date: Oct 13 (Fri), 2017
Time: 11:00am to 12:30pm
Venue: Room 6-213, 6/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building

We consider a dynamic pricing problem where the firm tries to maximize the profit upon selling a product over the course of T periods. We do not assume decision maker’s foreknowledge on the demand. Traditionally, the cost is fixed and the problem may be formulated as a multi armed bandit problem, which is known to have an O(log T) lower bound on the expected regret. In this paper, we consider a setting where the cost may change over time and the optimal price is thus a function of the cost. We develop an upper confidence bound like (UCB-Like) algorithm to solve the problem. We show that our algorithm is robust and efficient in terms of the upper bound on the expected regret.

Event Speaker
Mr Ying Zhong

Mr Ying Zhong is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Management Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. He holds a Master Degree of Applied Statistics from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Bachelor Degree of Computing Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie primarily on the ranking-and-selection problem and the multi armed bandit problem.