PricingBandits: Multi-Armed Bandit Approaches to Pricing Experiments

Implements multi-armed bandit approaches for pricing experiments with an unknown demand curve, as developed in Weaver, Kumar, and Jain, "Nonparametric Pricing Bandits Leveraging Informational Externalities to Learn the Demand Curve" <doi:10.1287/mksc.2022.0247>. Includes Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and Thompson Sampling (TS) baselines, Gaussian process variants ('GP-UCB', 'GP-TS'), monotonic Gaussian process variants that constrain demand to be weakly decreasing in price, and heterogeneous-noise extensions. The willingness-to-pay distribution is fully user-specified via a vector of consumer valuations, so any demand environment can be simulated or replayed.

Version: 2.0.0
Depends: R (≥ 3.5.0)
Imports: stats, Matrix, hash, nloptr, MASS, dplyr, TruncatedNormal, R.utils
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown, ggplot2
Published: 2026-09-09
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.PricingBandits (may not be active yet)
Author: Ian N. Weaver [aut, cre], Vineet Kumar [aut], Lalit Jain [aut]
Maintainer: Ian N. Weaver <weaver.n.ian at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/ian-weaver/PricingBandits/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/ian-weaver/PricingBandits
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: PricingBandits citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: PricingBandits results

Documentation:

Reference manual: PricingBandits.html , PricingBandits.pdf
Vignettes: Getting Started with PricingBandits (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: PricingBandits_2.0.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): PricingBandits_2.0.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): PricingBandits_2.0.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): PricingBandits_2.0.0.tgz

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