Machine Learning Times
Machine Learning Times
EXCLUSIVE HIGHLIGHTS
How Generative AI Helps Predictive AI
 Originally published in Forbes, August 21, 2024 This is the...
4 Ways Machine Learning Can Perpetuate Injustice and What to Do About It
 Originally published in Built In, July 12, 2024 When ML...
The Great AI Myth: These 3 Misconceptions Fuel It
 Originally published in Forbes, July 29, 2024 The hottest thing...
Where FICO Gets Its Data for Screening Two-Thirds of All Card Transactions
 Originally published in The European Business Review, March 21,...
SHARE THIS:

2 years ago
The Science of Price Experiments in the Amazon Store

 
Originally published in Amazon Science, April 14, 2023.  

The requirement that at any given time, all customers see the same prices for the same products necessitates innovation in the design of A/B experiments.

The prices of products in the Amazon Store reflect a range of factors, such as demand, seasonality, and general economic trends. Pricing policies typically involve formulas that take such factors into account; newer pricing policies usually rely on machine learning models.

With the Amazon Pricing Labs, we can conduct a range of online A/B experiments to evaluate new pricing policies. Because we practice nondiscriminatory pricing — all visitors to the Amazon Store at the same time see the same prices for all products — we need to apply experimental treatments to product prices over time, rather than testing different price points simultaneously on different customers. This complicates the experimental design.

In a paper we published in the Journal of Business Economics in March and presented at the American Economics Association’s annual conference in January (AEA), we described some of the experiments we can conduct to prevent spillovers, improve precision, and control for demand trends and differences in treatment groups when evaluating new pricing policies.

To continue reading this article, click here.

3 thoughts on “The Science of Price Experiments in the Amazon Store

Leave a Reply