UCL School of Management welcome Professor Omar Besbes, Columbia University, to host a research seminar discussing ‘Data-driven pricing… On the surprising value of your data’.

Abstract:

We consider two fundamental questions in data-driven decision making: 1) how should a decision-maker construct a mapping from historical data to decisions? 2) how much data is needed to operate “effectively”? We anchor the discussion around the central problem of pricing, and study different associated data structures. We present recent results that enable to quantify (robustly) achievable performance across data sizes. These results allow to uncover fundamental practical and quantitative insights on the value of data: in many applications, a little data can go a long way in optimizing decisions.