Dynamic pricing and learning: Historical origins, current research, and new directions

Abstract

The topic of dynamic pricing and learning has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, from different scientific communities. We survey these literature streams: we provide a brief introduction to the historical origins of quantitative research on pricing and demand estimation, point to different subfields in the area of dynamic pricing, and provide an in-depth overview of the available literature on dynamic pricing and learning. Our focus is on the operations research and management science literature, but we also discuss relevant contributions from marketing, economics, econometrics, and computer science. We discuss relations with methodologically related research areas, and identify directions for future research.