Speaker
Dr. Robert Phillips, Director of Pricing Research at Amazon where he leads a team of data scientists and economists and author of the books Pricing and Revenue Optimization and Pricing Credit Products as well as co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Pricing Management
Moderator
Moderated by Victor Araman, Associate Professor of Operations Management, OSB/CAMS steering committee
Synopsis
In this talk, the speaker discussed some of the most important pricing challenges facing on-line retailers and marketplaces. Dynamic pricing was pioneered by passenger airlines under the name “revenue management”. However, the rise of on-line commerce has both accelerated the velocity of pricing changes and vastly increased the amount of available data. Automated pricing algorithms are required to deal with the sheer volume and velocity of pricing changes and machine learning approaches are increasingly used to exploit the immense volume of available data. The speaker discussed the current state of the art in the application of analytics to pricing in high-velocity environments such as on-line retail. Specific topics include revenue management, the use of reinforcement learning for dynamic pricing, the challenges of conducting on-line pricing experiments, and estimation of the implications of pricing on long-term customer behavior.