We study the pricing problem faced by a firm that sells a large number of products, described via a wide range of features, to customers that arrive over time. This is motivated in part by the prevalence of online marketplaces that allow for real-time pricing. We propose a dynamic policy, called Regularized Maximum Likelihood Pricing (RMLP), that obtains asymptotically optimal revenue. Our poli...

Carbon leakage provides an efficiency argument for unilateral climate policy to differentiate emission prices in favor of emission-intensive and trade-exposed sectors. At the same time, differential emission pricing can be (mis-)used as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade. Using an optimal tax framework, we propose a method to decompose the leakage motive and the terms-of-tra...

We construct the contingent claims models that price participating policies with rate guarantees, bonuses and default risk. These policies are characterized by the sharing of profits from an investment portfolio between the insurer and the policy holders. A certain surplus distribution mechanism (reversionary bonus) is employed to credit interest at or above certain specified guaranteed rate pe...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to analyze which pharmaceutical policies European countries applied during the global financial crisis. METHODS We undertook a survey with officials from public authorities for pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement of 33 European countries represented in the PPRI (Pharmaceutical Pricing and Reimbursement Information) network based on a questionnaire...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product with a finite horizon and periodic review. The demand distribution in each period is determined by an exogenous Markov chain. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged. The surplus costs as well as fixed and variable costs are state dependent. We show t...

OBJECTIVES This study aims to conduct a descriptive analysis of the policy environment surrounding the generic medicines retail market in Portugal. The policy analysis focuses on supply-side measures (i.e. market access, pricing, reference-pricing and reimbursement of generic medicines) and demand-side measures (i.e. incentives for physicians to prescribe, for pharmacists to dispense and for pa...

Unlike frequent price promotions, a publicly announced permanent price cut is more likely to cause consumers to strategically shift their decision rules to adapt to the new pricing regime. Research is needed to (1) study whether permanent price cuts cause consumer preference to shift over time; (2) examine how the price cuts affect consumer choices in the short and long run; (3) examine the dif...

This paper describes an argumentation-based approach for automating the decision making process of an autonomous agent for pricing products. Product pricing usually involves different decision makers with different possibly conflicting points of view. Moreover, when considering firms in the retail business sector, they have hundreds or thousands of products to apply a pricing policy. Our approa...

The extent to which society benefits from an upgrade to a telecommunications network infrastructure depends on when that upgrade occurs. This paper discusses a proactive pricing approach in which the regulator defines a pricing policy to induce a profit-seeking monopoly carrier to upgrade the infrastructure at the socially desirable time. We discuss how the regulator can determine the optimal t...

In this paper, we demonstrate and discuss the economical results of applying a fixed, a dynamic and a stochastic approximation based pricing policy in a free commodity market model designed for computational grids. We present the pricing policies and our economydriven scheduling heuristic as a part of our market model in which we assume resource owners desire to profit or recover their costs, a...