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Online Pricing and Allocation with Demand Learning and Fulfillment Cost

We study online learning for a seller that jointly chooses per-period inventory positions and a uniform price, then fulfills realized demand through a downstream allocation.

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2025
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arxiv.org/abs/2501.18049ARXIV-DEFAULT
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Abstract

We study online learning for a seller that jointly chooses per-period inventory positions and a uniform price, then fulfills realized demand through a downstream allocation. The main difficulty is not only demand learning: the price shifts demand and reshapes the transportation LP, making the population objective globally non-convex and non-smooth. To solve this problem, we propose OCSAA, an algorithm that exploits demand observations through counterfactual translation and proposes joint (price, inventory) decisions through lower-confidence optimism. OCSAA admits a polynomial-time additive-accuracy implementation for rational-polytope inventory sets. We prove a high-probability \widetilde O(\sqrt T) regret guarantee and establish a matching-in-T information-theoretic lower bound. Our results illustrate an effective integration of statistical learning methodologies with complex operations research problems.