The profit-maximizing non-profit

Maximizing profit using recommender systems

Traditional recommendation systems make recommendations based solely on the customer’s past purchases, product ratings and demographic data without considering the profitability the items being recommended. In this work we study the question of how a vendor can directly incorporate the profitability of items into its recommender so as to maximize its expected profit while still providing accura...

On Maximizing Profit through Pricing

Several important practical problems and techniques which are familiar to both actuaries and underwriters are discussed informally and then analyzed mathematically. The main subjects are the degree to which profitability can be improved by estimating the expected losses of risks more accurately, and the usefulness of various methods of improving accuracy. The effect of raising or lowering the g...

Profit-maximizing pricing for tollbooths

The input to the tollbooth problem is a graph G = (V,E) and a set of m buyers Pi where each buyer is interested in buying a path Pi connecting si, ti ∈ V . Each buyer comes with a budget b(Pi), a positive real number. The problem is to set non-negative prices to the edges E of G. A buyer buys her path Pi if the sum of prices on Pi is at most her budget. If a buyer buys her path, we obtain a pro...

Multi-Attribute Profit-Maximizing Pricing

In the unlimited-supply profit-maximizing pricing problem, we are given the consumers’ consideration sets and know their purchase strategy (e.g. buy the cheapest items). The goal is to price the items to maximize the revenue. Previous studies suggest that this problem is too general to obtain even a sublinear approximation ratio (in terms of the number of items) even when the consumers are rest...

Unproductive Labor as Profit Rate Maximizing Labor