Abstract
In online platforms, the reviews posted by existing consumers are playing an increasingly important role in the purchasing decisions of potential consumers. Motivated by this observation, we study the problems faced by a platform selling a single product with no capacity constraint, where the demand is explicitly influenced by the reviews presented to the consumers. More precisely, we model a consumer’s browsing of reviews for a single product as following a cascade click model, with each consumer seeing some initial number of reviews and forming a utility estimate for the product based on the reviews the consumer has read. In the first part of the paper, we consider how to rank the reviews to induce short- and long-term revenue-maximizing purchasing behaviors. In the second part, we study how to set the price of the product. We derive structural insights and bounds on both problems. We also consider the case that the parameters of the model are unknown, where we propose algorithms that learn the parameters and optimize the ranking of the reviews or the price online. We show that our algorithms have regrets O(T23).
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