Dynamic Pricing with Heterogeneous Patience Levels

Abstract

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing in the presence of patient consumers. We call a consumer patient if she is willing to wait a certain number of periods for a lower price and will purchase as soon as the price is equal to or below her valuation. We allow for arbitrary joint distributions of patience levels and valuations. We propose an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for finding optimal pricing policies. The dynamic program requires a larger state space than its counterpart for a strategic consumers model. We find numerically that optimal policies can take the form of incomplete cyclic policies, combining features of both nested sales policies and decreasing cyclic policies.