Citation: Cornacchione, Edgard Bruno, Luciane Reginato, Joshua Onome Imoniana, and Marcelo Souza. 2023. Dynamic Pricing Models and Negotiating Agents: Developments in Management Accounting. Administrative Sciences 13: 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/ admsci13020057 Received: 13 December 2022 Revised: 1 February 2023 Accepted: 8 February 2023 Published: 13 February 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). administrative sciences Article Dynamic Pricing Models and Negotiating Agents: Developments in Management Accounting Edgard Bruno Cornacchione 1 , Luciane Reginato 1 , Joshua Onome Imoniana 1, * and Marcelo Souza 2 1 School of Economics, Management and Accounting, University of Sao Paulo, Prof Luciano Gualberto Ave 908, Sao Paulo 05508-010, Brazil 2 FIPECAFI (A Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Contábeis, Atuariais e Financeiras), R. Maestro Cardim 1170, Bela Vista, Sao Paulo 01323-001, Brazil * Correspondence: josh.imoniana@usp.br; Tel.: +55-11-99244-9055 Abstract: Linking decision systems, negotiating agents, management accounting, and computational accounting, this paper aims at exploring dynamic pricing strategies of a synthetic business-to- consumer online operation and a comparative analysis of evolving strategy-specific pricing opti- mization. Five price models based on market, utility, or demand information (three single and two combined), merging online and offline data, are explored over a seven-day period and with twenty selected products. A total of 17,529 website visits and 538 agent negotiations are studied (94,607 main data points) using a Python solution, with model simulation parameters and assumptions described. Findings show the combined market-utility-demand performance of dynamic pricing to be superior as an input to the negotiating agent. Contributions are threefold, pointing to (a) management accounting practice and research (dynamic pricing), (b) science and research strategy (method), and (c) accounting education (skill set). Keywords: dynamic pricing; negotiating agents; management accounting; computational accounting approach; data analytics; revenue management; buyer behavior; business-to-consumer 1. Introduction Trade has always been a vital part of societies, with numerous advantages for all parties. Accounting has also played a role in this evolution, making sense of transactions and enabling parties to explore new alternatives to improve business performance. More recently, with ever-increasing technological capability, providers and consumers (to name a few involved parties) have been exposed to the online market, business-to-consumer connections, and a plethora of data to support business decisions. Therefore, new oppor- tunities are presented on a daily basis for managers and accountants, especially for those more actively interested in the interplay between technology and business. Pricing decisions, in light of the evolution of organizational strategies and goal-setting environment, have morphed as well. Typical pricing approaches, rooted in specialized literature from the 50s and 60s, gave room to more alternatives taking advantage of a plethora of relevant data and technical models, including experimenting and comparing their effectiveness. With the advent of the internet, endless improvement of the business-to- consumer space, streamlined transactions, and improved knowledge about the consumer, the provider, and competitors required executives to improve their pricing strategies and tactics. Many are examples in this century of e-commerce players (Streitfeld 2016; Mohammed 2017) implementing some sort of pricing innovation. If handling the typical human pricing decision to algorithms or robots is still a challenge for many players, neglecting to accept advances and variants of how competitors are dealing with this issue may represent an even more threatening option. Not to mention the potential to be brought by negotiating agents in the realm of smart contracts. Studies about smart contracts have revealed themselves in the accounting area. Chow et al. (2021) explore the use of Adm. Sci. 2023, 13, 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci13020057 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/admsci