Personalizing Benefits Allocation Without Spending Money: Utilizing Uplift Modeling in a Budget Constrained Setup

Abstract

Modern e-commerce platforms make use of promotional offers such as discounts and rewards to encourage customers to complete purchases. While offering the promotions has a great effect on the sales, it also generates a monetary loss. By utilizing causal machine learning and optimization, our team at Booking.com was able to personalize the promotions allocation to customers, while efficiently controlling the spend within a given budget. In this talk we’ll share the personalized promotion assignment techniques, such as uplift modeling and constrained optimization, which helped us to predict the outcomes of discounts offering and allocate them efficiently. This solution allowed us to unlock promotional campaigns to bring more value to the customers and grow our business.