Data-driven pricing and inventory management with applications in fashion retail

Fashion retail is typically characterized by (1) high demand uncertainty and products with short life cycles, which complicates demand forecasting, and (2) low salvage values and long supply lead times, which penalizes for inaccurate demand forecasting. In this thesis, we are interested in the design of algorithms that leverage fashion retail data to improve demand forecasting, and that make revenue-maximizing or cost-minimizing pricing and inventory management decisions. First, we study a multi-period dynamic pricing problem with feature information. We are especially interested in demand model misspecification, and show that it can lead to price endogeneity, and hence inconsistent price elasticity estimates and suboptimal pricing decisions. We propose a "random price shock" (RPS) algorithm that combines instrumental variables, well known in econometrics, with online learning, in order to simultaneously estimate demand and optimize revenue.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Nambiar, Mila.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Simchi-Levi.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123720

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123720