Problem definition: Designing effective operational strategies requires a good understanding of customer behavior. The classic economic theory of customer choice has long been the paradigm in the operations literature. However, the rise of online marketplaces such as e-commerce has triggered considerable efforts in academia and industry to develop alternative models that not only provide a good approximation of customer behavior but also are easily scalable for large-scale implementations. In this paper, we consider a multiproduct dynamic pricing problem with limited inventories under the so-called cascade click model, which is one of the most popular click models used in practice and has been intensively studied in the computer science literature. Methodology/results: We present some fundamental results. First, we derive a sufficiently general characterization of the optimal pricing policy and show that it has a different structure than the optimal policy under the standard pricing model. Second, we show that the optimal expected total revenue under the cascade click model can be upper bounded by the objective value of an approximate deterministic pricing problem. Third, we show that two policies that are known to have strong performance guarantees in the standard revenue management setting can be properly adapted (in a nontrivial way) to the setting with cascade click model while retaining their strong performance. Finally, we also briefly discuss the joint ranking and pricing problem and provide an iterative heuristic to calculate an approximate ranking. Managerial implications: Taking into account customers’ click-and-search behavior leads to different structures of the optimal pricing policy, and some common insights under the standard pricing models may no longer hold. Moreover, our simulation studies show that pricing under a (misspecified) classic choice model that is oblivious to customers click-and-search behavior can severely impact profitability.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0504 .

中文翻译：

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级联点击模型下有限库存的多产品动态定价

问题定义：设计有效的运营策略需要充分了解客户行为。客户选择的经典经济理论长期以来一直是运营文献中的范式。然而，电子商务等在线市场的兴起引发了学术界和工业界的巨大努力，以开发替代模型，这些模型不仅可以很好地近似客户行为，而且可以轻松扩展以进行大规模实施。在本文中，我们考虑了所谓的级联点击模型下有限库存的多产品动态定价问题，该模型是实践中最流行的点击模型之一，并且在计算机科学文献中得到了深入研究。方法/结果：我们提出了一些基本结果。首先，我们得出了最优定价政策的足够普遍的特征，并表明它具有与标准定价模型下的最优政策不同的结构。其次，我们证明级联点击模型下的最优预期总收入可以由近似确定性定价问题的目标值确定上限。第三，我们表明，已知在标准收入管理设置中具有强大性能保证的两种策略可以适当地（以非平凡的方式）适应级联点击模型的设置，同时保留其强大的性能。最后，我们还简要讨论了联合排名和定价问题，并提供了计算近似排名的迭代启发式方法。管理意义：考虑客户的点击和搜索行为会导致最优定价策略的不同结构，并且标准定价模型下的一些常见见解可能不再成立。此外，我们的模拟研究表明，在忽视客户点击和搜索行为的（错误指定的）经典选择模型下进行定价可能会严重影响盈利能力。补充材料：在线附录可在 https://doi.org/10.1287 上获取。 /msom.2021.0504 。