arXiv Machine Learning

Across-Design Uncertainty in Short Pricing Panels: Evidence from Simulated Price Trajectories

arXiv AI
Jun 16

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

arXiv:2606. 16183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices.

By Chengpiao Huang, Kaizheng Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Beyond the Illusion of Power: Calibrating Quasi-Experiments in Observational IS

Information systems researchers increasingly rely on quasi‑experimental methods such as difference‑in‑differences and instrumental variables to infer causal effects from observational panel data. A large Monte Carlo study of 9,837 parameter settings (≈9.8 million simulated datasets) shows that the gap between planned and achieved power is largely driven by serial correlation, panel attrition, staggered adoption bias, and parallel‑trend pre‑testing—factors that no closed‑form power calculator can fully capture. For IV designs, increasing sample size does not improve power or reduce exclusion bias unless instrument strength is enhanced, underscoring that identification hinges on the instrument rather than on larger N.

By Spandan Ghose Chowdhury
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Selection Bias Correction in Retail Intelligence

The paper examines how retail intelligence, which often focuses on high‑velocity products, can suffer from selection bias that skews inflation estimates by overlooking niche items. Using 400 Monte Carlo simulations across four data‑generating scenarios, the authors compare Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and stratification methods. They find that stratification generally outperforms IPW—achieving sub‑0.04 percentage‑point median error even when population breaks misalign—while IPW only excels under smooth polynomial relationships, highlighting the importance of method choice in long‑tail retail contexts.

By Spandan Ghose Chowdhury
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Supracompetitive Pricing Under AI Monoculture

arXiv:2601. 01279v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When competing sellers delegate pricing to a shared AI model, such as a large language model, correlated recommendations combined with performance-driven updates aggregating seller feedback raise a key question: can standard AI deployment practices inadvertently produce supracompetitive pricing?

By Shengyu Cao, Ming Hu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

LLP: LLM-Based Product Pricing in E-commerce

The paper introduces LLP, a Large Language Model–based generative framework for pricing second‑hand products on consumer‑to‑consumer platforms. LLP retrieves similar items to capture market dynamics, then uses LLMs to generate price suggestions, refined through supervised fine‑tuning and group relative policy optimization. A confidence‑based filter rejects unreliable predictions, and experiments show LLP outperforms prior methods, achieving higher static adoption rates when deployed on Xianyu.

By Hairu Wang, Sheng You, Qiheng Zhang, Xike Xie, Shuguang Han, Yuchen Wu, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

CEDAR: Controlled and Event-Driven Demand Forecasting via Residual Decomposition

CEDAR is a two‑stage framework for demand forecasting that incorporates planned actions and external event signals. Stage I uses an Action‑Interleaved Transformer to model controllable state transitions under interventions, while Stage II applies a Residual Correction Module that aligns event descriptions with product context using LLM‑assisted text representations. Experiments on a large Alibaba 1688 dataset show that CEDAR improves simulation accuracy over traditional time‑series forecasting baselines and benefits real‑world budget planning.

By Junjie Meng, Ranxu Zhang, Zi-an Zhang, Shujun Liu, Xiaoning Qi, Xiaozhou Xu, Yanyong Zhang, Hui Xiong, Chao Wang