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Machine Learning based Framework for Robust Price-Sensitivity Estimation with Application to Airline Pricing

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  • Ravi Kumar
  • Shahin Boluki
  • Karl Isler
  • Jonas Rauch
  • Darius Walczak

Abstract

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing of a product in the presence of feature-dependent price sensitivity. Developing practical algorithms that can estimate price elasticities robustly, especially when information about no purchases (losses) is not available, to drive such automated pricing systems is a challenge faced by many industries. Based on the Poisson semi-parametric approach, we construct a flexible yet interpretable demand model where the price related part is parametric while the remaining (nuisance) part of the model is non-parametric and can be modeled via sophisticated machine learning (ML) techniques. The estimation of price-sensitivity parameters of this model via direct one-stage regression techniques may lead to biased estimates due to regularization. To address this concern, we propose a two-stage estimation methodology which makes the estimation of the price-sensitivity parameters robust to biases in the estimators of the nuisance parameters of the model. In the first-stage we construct estimators of observed purchases and prices given the feature vector using sophisticated ML estimators such as deep neural networks. Utilizing the estimators from the first-stage, in the second-stage we leverage a Bayesian dynamic generalized linear model to estimate the price-sensitivity parameters. We test the performance of the proposed estimation schemes on simulated and real sales transaction data from the Airline industry. Our numerical studies demonstrate that our proposed two-stage approach reduces the estimation error in price-sensitivity parameters from 25\% to 4\% in realistic simulation settings. The two-stage estimation techniques proposed in this work allows practitioners to leverage modern ML techniques to robustly estimate price-sensitivities while still maintaining interpretability and allowing ease of validation of its various constituent parts.

Suggested Citation

  • Ravi Kumar & Shahin Boluki & Karl Isler & Jonas Rauch & Darius Walczak, 2022. "Machine Learning based Framework for Robust Price-Sensitivity Estimation with Application to Airline Pricing," Papers 2205.01875, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2205.01875
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    References listed on IDEAS

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