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Simple sample based pricing can closely match personal pricing revenue

Personalised versus Posted Pricing from Samples

Abstract: Personalised pricing maximises expected revenue from a market but requires detailed information about individual customers. How much of this revenue can be recovered using a simple posted price based on a finite number of samples from the underlying value distribution? We answer this question by maximising the worst-case ratio between the expected revenues of posted and personalised pricing over the fundamental class of $λ$-regular value distributions. Our results reveal a structural transition as a function of $λ$. For the class of monotone hazard rate (MHR) distributions, corresponding to $λ= 0$, the sample mean is an optimal statistic: the entire sample can be compressed into its average without any loss of revenue. Beyond the MHR class, corresponding to $λ> 0$, this property disappears. We show that the sample mean is no longer optimal, revealing that optimal sample-based pricing rules become substantially more intricate. Nevertheless, we show that a remarkably simple order-statistic based pricing rule is asymptotically optimal as the number of samples $n$ grows, achieving the optimal approximation ratio up to a tight error of order $1/n$. Our analysis combines techniques from probability, approximation theory and optimization, including doubly infinite linear programming, hypergeometric functions, and combinatorial identities involving incomplete Beta functions.

Wed 23 SeptData Structures and Algorithms
The gist
Setting prices personalized to each customer can make the most money but needs lots of info about people. The authors studied how well simple fixed prices based on a few examples of customer values can do instead. They found that for some common value types, just using the average of samples works great. But for other types, smarter rules using specific sample points do better, and these rules get almost perfect as you see more samples. Their work uses math tools to understand when and why simple pricing methods work well or not.
Open → 2609.28181v1