Professur Wirtschaftsinformatik 2
Adaptive Pricing Intelligence
Professur Wirtschaftsinformatik 2 

Adaptive Pricing Intelligence

Price is the ultimate discriminator for customers buying decisions. Price transparency and low communication costs for price changes in E-Commerce environments enable and – due to market dynamics – nowadays even require the implementation of agil, (semi-)automated price adaptation mechanisms. In a number of industries Dynamic Pricing applications belong to the established techniques for maximizing revenue. Best known and experienced by many customers are examples from the travel industry, e.g. airlines specifically low-cost-carriers. Currently methods and processes leave their originating domain and reach wide-spread adoption in webshops of all shades. What is still missing are guidelines, best-practises and methodologies for building such systems in general and the E-Commerce domain in particular.

The primary goal of this project is therefore to understand the requirements for such a methodology, to create it and eventually demonstrate its feasibilty in the field.

To reach this goal the project proceeds in five steps:

  1. Define the role and the special requirements of Dynamic Pricing in E-Commerce environments.
  2. Capture the state-of-the-art of Dynamic Pricing in E-Commerce: to capture the state-of-the-art of Dynamic Pricing in E-Commerce a survey was conducted in Q4/2011.
  3. Document current industry practices: during 2011 a series of case study interviews is sheduled with industry partners to document current practises when implementing and integrating Dynamic Pricing applications for webshops.
  4. Derive a best practice methodology: Q1/2012 to Q2/2012 is devoted to engage in this task together with industry partners, experts and researchers.
  5. Evaluate the methodology in cooperation with industry partners.

The project is constantly looking for industry partners the have accomplished the integration of Dynamic Pricing into their webshops or are interested in starting such a project. Currently the project is supported by the real-time Data Mining provider prudsys AG and the E-Commerce portal ECC-Handel. If you are interested to join or need further information, please feel free to contact Christian.