Game Theory & Data Mining model for price dynamics in financial institutions

To model market dynamics is a challenge that has attracted the interest of practitioners and researchers alike. This problem has been addressed from the perspective of Game Theory, in models that explicitly include profit-maximization schemes for the companies, and also from the point of view of Data Mining, with models that consider multivariate functions to model customer demands and related phenomena. In this work we present a two-stage model that unifies both approaches. A hybrid neural network-support vector machines model estimates multiclass demand at a customer level, which then serves as input for a game-theoretic model that considers the strategic relationships between costs and demands in pricing schemes for Bertrand equilibria. The model was applied to a database in a loan-granting institution with good results. New knowledge discovered includes insights about cost structures and the institutions' competitive behavior, providing new business opportunities.

[1]  Isabelle Guyon,et al.  Statistical Learning and Kernel Methods in Bioinformatics , 2003 .

[2]  Nello Cristianini,et al.  An introduction to Support Vector Machines , 2000 .

[3]  J. Platt Sequential Minimal Optimization : A Fast Algorithm for Training Support Vector Machines , 1998 .

[4]  Lei Yang,et al.  Optimal Pricing and Order Strategies of Three-Stage Reverse Supply Chain under Stochastic Demand Based on the Stackelberg Model , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering.

[5]  Ryan M. Rifkin,et al.  In Defense of One-Vs-All Classification , 2004, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[6]  Bart J. Bronnenberg,et al.  Structural Applications of the Discrete Choice Model , 2002 .

[7]  Puneet Manchanda,et al.  Differences in Dynamic Brand Competition Across Markets: An Empirical Analysis , 2005 .

[8]  Pradeep K. Chintagunta,et al.  Investigating Dynamic Multifirm Market Interactions in Price and Advertising , 1999 .

[9]  R. Stephenson A and V , 1962, The British journal of ophthalmology.

[10]  Astrid A. Dick,et al.  Demand Estimation and Consumer Welfare in the Banking Industry , 2002 .

[11]  John Platt,et al.  Probabilistic Outputs for Support vector Machines and Comparisons to Regularized Likelihood Methods , 1999 .

[12]  RadhaKanta Mahapatra,et al.  Business data mining - a machine learning perspective , 2001, Inf. Manag..

[13]  Pradeep K. Chintagunta,et al.  Time-Varying Competition , 2005 .

[14]  Guoqiang Peter Zhang,et al.  Avoiding Pitfalls in Neural Network Research , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[15]  Drew Fudenberg,et al.  Game theory (3. pr.) , 1991 .

[16]  Vladimir Vapnik,et al.  Statistical learning theory , 1998 .

[17]  Richard Weber,et al.  Probability estimation for multiclass problems combining SVMs and neural networks , 2010 .

[18]  Jesús Cid-Sueiro,et al.  Cost functions to estimate a posteriori probabilities in multiclass problems , 1999, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks.