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.
Authors
- Ezekiel Ong Young (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7568-1230)
- Hady Wirawan Lauw (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8245-8677)
Institutions
- Singapore Management University (SG)
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
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00