Mining Utility-Maximizing Prices for Mixed Bundles

We study a data-driven bundle pricing problem with the following objective: given a predefined set of bundles, determine prices that maximize revenue under utility-maximizing consumer behavior. Classical mixed bundling models either assume a complete bundle menu with single-bundle choice or impose simplified pricing structures to ensure scalability. In contrast, we consider a setting in which the seller offers a restricted and potentially overlapping bundle catalog, allowing consumers to optimally select multiple non-overlapping bundles. This setting necessitates addressing two tightly coupled challenges: determining the price of each bundle and computing the revenue it generates under dependent consumer choice. Together, these challenges introduce additional combinatorial complexity in consumer decision-making and preserve strong price interdependencies across bundles. To address these challenges, we propose the Integrated Price Mining Method (IPMM), a scalable approach that approximates fully conditional pricing while explicitly accounting for dependent demand. We formalize consumer response as a utility maximization problem and show that it corresponds to a weighted set packing formulation. For price determination, IPMM combines balanced partitioning, sequential price search guided by competitive independence, dominance-based pruning, and cross-partition refinement to manage price dependence efficiently. Extensive experiments on synthetic instances and curated real-world bundle catalogs demonstrate that IPMM consistently achieves higher revenue coverage than classical and modern pricing baselines while remaining computationally tractable.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
Published
2026-11-06
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3860659
Primary Topic
Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing
Type
article
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article

Mining Utility-Maximizing Prices for Mixed Bundles

Ezekiel Ong Young, Hady Wirawan Lauw
1 links
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing
article

Mining Utility-Maximizing Prices for Mixed Bundles

Ezekiel Ong Young, Hady Wirawan Lauw
article en

Abstract

We study a data-driven bundle pricing problem with the following objective: given a predefined set of bundles, determine prices that maximize revenue under utility-maximizing consumer behavior. Classical mixed bundling models either assume a complete bundle menu with single-bundle choice or impose simplified pricing structures to ensure scalability. In contrast, we consider a setting in which the seller offers a restricted and potentially overlapping bundle catalog, allowing consumers to optimally select multiple non-overlapping bundles. This setting necessitates addressing two tightly coupled challenges: determining the price of each bundle and computing the revenue it generates under dependent consumer choice. Together, these challenges introduce additional combinatorial complexity in consumer decision-making and preserve strong price interdependencies across bundles. To address these challenges, we propose the Integrated Price Mining Method (IPMM), a scalable approach that approximates fully conditional pricing while explicitly accounting for dependent demand. We formalize consumer response as a utility maximization problem and show that it corresponds to a weighted set packing formulation. For price determination, IPMM combines balanced partitioning, sequential price search guided by competitive independence, dominance-based pruning, and cross-partition refinement to manage price dependence efficiently. Extensive experiments on synthetic instances and curated real-world bundle catalogs demonstrate that IPMM consistently achieves higher revenue coverage than classical and modern pricing baselines while remaining computationally tractable.

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
Singapore Management University (SG)
Openalex Percentile: Top 11%
Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing
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