Pricing the Thin Market

Written by Swapnil Kashyap, Louis Volschenk, Anneke Heckroodt, Tusar Patel and Giorgio Celestre, this book 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.

Reserve prices for second-hand buses are usually set by hand, by a few experts, in a market with too few sales to model easily. 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. Written for auction platforms, fleet remarketing teams, pricing analysts and AI practitioners.

Readers also get access to online companion resources: Python code, a synthetic dataset, database scripts and a live demonstration of the valuation engine.