ISyE Seminar: Price Delegation with Learning Agents

Please join us for our first seminar of fall semester via Zoom. This fall, there will be a mixture of in-person and virtual seminars with two different tracks: research and analytics. This first seminar will be research-focused and will feature Florin Ciocan from INSEAD who will discuss price delegation with learning agents.

Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021

3:30 - Graduate seminar
4:30 p.m. - Reception

Zoom meeting link
Password: ISyE2021

About the seminar

Many firms delegate pricing decisions to sales agents that directly interact with customers. The premise behind this practice is that sales agents can gather informative signals about the customer's valuation for the product of interest. This information acquired through the interaction with the customer can then be used to make better pricing decisions. Professor Ciocan and his team study the underlying principal agent problem that arises in such situations, which they believe fills a void in the revenue management literature. In this setting, the agent can exert costly effort to learn a customer's valuation and decide on the price to quote to the customer, while the firm needs to offer a contract to the agent to induce the desired joint learning and pricing behavior.

About the speaker

Florin Ciocan is an assistant professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD. His research interests are in applications of revenue management to non-traditional domains such as online advertising and other Internet-facilitated marketplaces