Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Bert Zwart (CWI - Stochastics) - Learning and Earning

Speaker: Bert Zwart , CWI - Stochastic Group

Talk Title: Learning and Earning

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Price experimentation is an important tool for firms to find the optimal selling price of their products and has become more popular due to the rise of internet as a sales channel. It should be conducted properly, since experimenting with selling prices can be costly. A firm therefore needs to find a pricing policy that optimally balances between learning the optimal price and gaining revenue. The topic is exciting from an academic standpoint, bridging control, game theory, machine learning, operations research and statistics.

We investigate the so-called 'certainty equivalent pricing' policy, where estimating consumer behavior and optimizing profit are completely decoupled, and discuss situations where this rule may or may not lead to the profit rate that is achievable. It turns out that it is sometimes necessary to develop algorithms that ensure that the right amount of price experimentation is undertaken so as to learn and exploit consumer behavior as efficiently as possible.

This is based on joint work with Arnoud den Boer (UTwente, NL)

Biography: Bert Zwart is a researcher at CWI, where he leads the Stochastic group. He also holds secondary positions at VU University Amsterdam (Professor), Georgia Tech (Adjunct Professor) and the Dutch research center on Stochastics, Eurandom. Before that he was holding a Coca-Cola Chair at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is in applied probability and stochastic operations research, inspired by problems in computer, communication, energy and service networks. Bert Zwart is the 2008 recipient of the Erlang prize for outstanding contributions to applied probability by a researcher not older than 35 years old, an IBM faculty award, VENI and VIDI awards from the Dutch Science Foundation NWO, numerous best papers awards, and co-authered more than 100 refereed publications. Bert has been area editor of Stochastic Models for the journal Operations Research, the flagship journal of his profession, since 2009, and serves on several additional journal boards and TPC's.


Host: Leana Golubchik

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair