ACT, WAIT, or EXPERIMENT: A Causal Governance Framework for Retail Price Optimization Under Abstentions
This paper presents a causal decision framework for list-price elasticities in intermediated retail channels, where estimates are confounded by promotions, competitor moves and shopkeeper pass-through. Rather than forcing a number when the evidence is ambiguous, the system treats abstention (Wait) as an active diagnostic output. Built on Double Machine Learning and conformal prediction, it evaluates whether conditions exist to act on a recommended price or whether…