Ergodic control of a heterogeneous population and application to electricity pricing

Abstract

We consider a revenue maximization model, in which a company aims at designing a menu of contracts, given a population of customers. A standard approach consists in constructing an incentive-compatible continuum of contracts, i.e., a menu composed of an infinite number of contracts, where each contract is especially adapted to an infinitesimal customer, taking his type into account. Nonetheless, in many applications, the company is constrained to offering a limited number of contracts. We show that this question reduces to an optimal quantization problem, similar to the pruning problem that appeared in the max-plus based numerical methods in optimal control. We develop a new quantization algorithm, which, given an initial menu of contracts, iteratively prunes the less important contracts, to construct an implementable menu of the desired cardinality, while minimizing the revenue loss. We apply this algorithm to solve a pricing problem with price-elastic demand, originating from the electricity retail market. Numerical results show an improved performance by comparison with earlier pruning algorithms.