Pricing the Thin Market
Explainable AI for Reserve Prices in Used-Bus Auctions
Swapnil Kashyap, Louis Volschenk, Anneke Heckroodt, Tusar Patel and Giorgio Celestre
Reserve prices for second-hand buses are usually set by hand, by a few experts, in a market with too few sales to model with confidence. Pricing the Thin Market shows how a team built an explainable AI tool that recommends a defensible reserve price for any used bus and sets out the reasoning behind every figure. The book follows the full journey: buyer and seller research, data preparation and governance, a transparent multiplicative valuation model, champion–challenger comparison, validation in a thin market, and responsible deployment. It is written for auction platforms, fleet remarketing teams, pricing analysts and AI practitioners. This site holds the reader resources that accompany the book: Python code, a synthetic sample dataset, database scripts, the research questionnaire, high-resolution figures and access to a live demo.
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