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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2005

Economics

Yale University

Optimal pricing

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Robust Monopoly Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Karl Schlag Jul 2005

Robust Monopoly Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Karl Schlag

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We consider a robust version of the classic problem of optimal monopoly pricing with incomplete information. In the robust version, the seller faces model uncertainty and only knows that the true demand distribution is in the neighborhood of a given model distribution. We characterize the optimal pricing policy under two distinct, but related, decision criteria with multiple priors: (i) maximin expected utility and (ii) minimax expected regret. The resulting optimal pricing policy under either criterion yields a robust policy to the model uncertainty. While the classic monopoly policy and the maximin criterion yield a single deterministic price, minimax regret always …


Robust Monopoly Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Karl Schlag Jul 2005

Robust Monopoly Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Karl Schlag

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We consider a robust version of the classic problem of optimal monopoly pricing with incomplete information. In the robust version of the problem the seller only knows that demand will be in a neighborhood of a given model distribution. We characterize the optimal pricing policy under two distinct, but related, decision criteria with multiple priors: (i) maximin expected utility and (ii) minimax expected regret. While the classic monopoly policy and the maximin criterion yield a single deterministic price, minimax regret always prescribes a random pricing policy, or equivalently, a multi-item menu policy. The resulting optimal pricing policy under either criterion …