Personalised versus Posted Pricing from Samples

Abstract

Personalised pricing maximises expected revenue from a market but requires detailed information about individual customers. How much of this revenue can be recovered using a simple posted price based on a finite number of samples from the underlying value distribution? We answer this question by maximising the worst-case ratio between the expected revenues of posted and personalised pricing over the fundamental class of $λ$-regular value distributions. Our results reveal a structural transition as a function of $λ$. For the class of monotone hazard rate (MHR) distributions, corresponding to $λ= 0$, the sample mean is an optimal statistic: the entire sample can be compressed into its average without any loss of revenue. Beyond the MHR class, corresponding to $λ> 0$, this property disappears. We show that the sample mean is no longer optimal, revealing that optimal sample-based pricing rules become substantially more intricate. Nevertheless, we show that a remarkably simple order-statistic based pricing rule is asymptotically optimal as the number of samples $n$ grows, achieving the optimal approximation ratio up to a tight error of order $1/n$. Our analysis combines techniques from probability, approximation theory and optimization, including doubly infinite linear programming, hypergeometric functions, and combinatorial identities involving incomplete Beta functions.