Diligence
The nine questions pricing-software diligence is converging on.
Any serious vendor can answer the first eight from documentation it already holds. The ninth needs measurement. World0 answers all nine for its own measurement system on a call.
Download the plain text version
No form, no email address, no sign-up.
If you sell pricing software
These are the questions your customers will ask.
Your customers will send you this list. The first eight are answered from documentation a serious vendor already holds. The ninth asks for pre-deployment measurement of the configuration being sold, and World0 runs that measurement. Book a call and put the hardest of the nine first.
If you buy pricing software
The list is yours.
Take it, send it to your vendors under your own name. Any serious vendor can answer the first eight, and the ninth tells you who measured.
Structure and entities
-
How many distinct pricing entities does your deployment create?
Does one model instance, or one fitted model, ever price for more than one competing seller?
-
Which components are shared across client deployments?
Weights, training data, feature stores, demand estimates, benchmarks. What isolates one client's data from every other client's estimator?
Data and identification
-
Is any model fitted on data pooled across competing sellers?
If pooling exists in any form, what does the vendor claim it identifies, and what validates that claim before deployment?
Configuration
-
Which configuration constants change the system's pricing behavior, and how does each scale as data volume grows?
Does regularization scale with sample count? Who reviews these constants before a deployment, and are they disclosed to the client?
Action space
-
What price floors, caps or bands constrain the system?
What does the system do at a band edge, and is time spent at band edges monitored, logged and reported to the client?
Monitoring
-
Does production monitoring cover the full distribution of pricing outcomes, including extreme episodes, or does it report summary averages?
What triggers human review of an extreme pricing episode, and who sees it?
Learning dynamics
-
Does the system refit or adapt in production?
Can fitted coefficients move in response to rivals' observed behavior? How does the vendor classify the system: a demand forecaster, an adaptive system reacting to competitors, or a strategic agent?
For AI agent systems
-
Which base model and which dated snapshot does the deployment run?
Are sampling settings fixed, disclosed and reproducible? Do competing deployments run the same base model, and what does the vendor do about the correlation risks of shared weights?
Evidence
-
Can the vendor produce pre-deployment measurement of conduct-relevant behavior for the configuration being sold?
A good answer shows a design locked and deposited in advance, a controlled synthetic market, and results a reviewer can reproduce independently from the logs. What acceptance criteria does the vendor set for its own system in advance, and what measured result would fail them?
How to read the answers
What a good answer looks like.
A vendor with good answers documents entity separation, discloses its constants, monitors its tails, and can hand over measurement a reviewer can check. The ninth is the question no documentation answers today.
The nine turn what a pre-deployment measurement examines into questions a buyer can put to a vendor.