Intelligent decision support for the pricing of products andservices in competitive consumer markets

摘要

We describe a novel class of systems called intelligent tacticalndecision support systems which enable firms to make superior pricingndecisions within a dynamic competitive environment. The paper outlinesnthe unique aspects of such systems in relation to commercially availablensystems. These aspects are seen to be their ability to process and usenknowledge on the one hand and information external to the organizationnon the other. The systems use nonlinear models, optimization, andnlearning algorithms to provide decision support capabilities for thengeneric price-setting problem. The general theme of the paper is to seenthe systems described within the paper as the support tools for angeneric price setting process. The description of the systems start withna generic one for pricing decision support in any consumer market and isnthen specialized to various markets, each of which could benefit from anspecific variant of the generic pricing technology which has beennadapted to that particular industry. The adaptations from the genericnpricing system to the systems for petrol pricing, retail pricing, andntelecommunications taxation, are explained. These three examples show anvariety of price-setting situations ranging from near commodity pricing,nas in the case of petrol, to pricing of very sophisticated services, asnin the case of mobile telephony. Field experiments with these systemsnshow that they perform significantly better than unassisted humanndecision-makers. This is seen from controlled experiments where thesensystems have demonstrated significant profit uplift when applied to thenexperimentation sites as compared to the “control” sitesnwhere the systems have not been applied