A Decision Procedure for Bundle Purchasing with Incomplete Information on Future Prices

This paper introduces the online bundle purchasing problem (OBPP) as a new computational challenge induced by e-commerce technology. The task of the OBPP is to decide which of possibly many satisfactory combinations (bundles) of items should be purchased, from whom, and when, to maximize the buyer’s overall satisfaction. Satisfaction, formalized as multiattribute utility, includes attitudes toward quality, reputation and risk. The Prequote-Quote-Rescind (PQR) protocol communicates probabilistic and temporal information on items’ future prices and availabilities. A comparison set, defined as a set of bundles in which all items will be available for a fixed interval and their prices known, determines future intervals when purchase decisions will be fully informed. A decision procedure is provided that makes effective use of comparison sets, and provably improves a buyer’s expected utility compared with a näıve decision procedure.