Integrated inventory models considering the two-level trade credit policy and a price-negotiation scheme

This paper develops the integrated inventory models with permissible delay in payment, in which customers’ demand is sensitive to the buyer’s price. The models consider the two-level trade credit policy in the vendor–buyer and buyer–customer relationships in supply chain management. A simple recursive solution procedure is proposed for the integrated models to determine the buyer’s optimal pricing and production/order strategy. Although the total profit from the buyer and vendor increases together, the buyer’s share lessens. To compensate the buyer’s loss due to the cooperative relationship, a negotiation system is presented in order to allocate the profit increase to the vendor and buyer to determine the pricing and production/order strategy. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are provided to illustrate the proposed model. The results indicate that the total profit from the buyer and vendor together can increase, although a price discount is given to the buyer in the proposed models.     

Dynamic pricing and warranty policies for products with fixed lifetime

We consider a repairable product with known market entry and departure times. A warranty policy is offered with product purchase, under which a customer can have a failed item repaired free of charge in the warranty period. It is assumed that customers are heterogeneous in their risk attitudes toward uncertain repair costs incurred after the warranty expires. The objective is to determine a joint dynamic pricing and warranty policy for the lifetime of the product, which maximizes the manufacturer’s expected profit. In the first part of the analysis, we consider a linearly decreasing price function and a constant warranty length. We first study customers’ purchase patterns under several different pricing strategies by the manufacturer and then discuss the optimal pricing and warranty strategy. In the second part, we assume that the warranty length can be altered once during the product lifetime in developing a joint pricing and warranty policy. Numerical studies show that a dynamic warranty policy can significantly outperform a fixed-length warranty policy.     

When should service firms provide free experience service?

By providing a free experience service, a service firm can attract more uninformed customers. However, it could reversely effect the delay-sensitive, informed customers’ decision. In this paper, we study a priority queueing system with free experience services. We study the customer behavior in equilibrium after we derive the expected customer waiting time. We then construct the service firm’s revenue function and obtain an optimal strategy for the service firm. Our results suggest that when the market size of informed customers is relatively small, the firm should consider providing free experience services for uninformed customers. Conversely, if the demand rate of potential informed customers is quite high, the firm should ignore uninformed customers.     

Maximum utility product pricing models and algorithms based on reservation price

We consider a revenue management model for pricing a product line with several customer segments under the assumption that customers’ product choices are determined entirely by their reservation prices. We highlight key mathematical properties of the maximum utility model and formulate it as a mixed-integer programming problem, design heuristics and valid cuts. We further present extensions of the models to deal with various practical issues arising in applications. Our computational experiments with real data from the tourism sector as well as with the randomly generated data show the effectiveness of our approach.     

A parsimonious stochastic model for forecasting gamers' revenues in casinos

The gaming industry is the largest entertainment industry in the United States, with more than $80 billion in revenue annually. Because of the stochasticity of gambling outcomes and the complexity of the casino context, forecasting individual‐level revenues in a casino setting is extremely challenging, and yet crucial for customer relationship management. Current approaches for customer base analysis are usually too general to handle the unique context of the casino setting. To fill this gap between research and practice, this paper develops a stochastic model that incorporates visitation, wagering, and gambling outcomes to forecast gamers' revenues for a major casino operator. The proposed model is parsimonious and can be scaled to handle massive casino customer databases. Despite its parsimony, a holdout prediction test shows that the proposed model provides more accurate individual‐level revenue predictions than other forecasting methods that are based only on the observed data. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the complexity of a bundle pricing problem

We consider the problem of pricing items in order to maximize the revenue obtainable from a set of single minded customers. We relate the tractability of the problem to structural properties of customers’ valuations: the problem admits an efficient approximation algorithm, parameterized along the inhomogeneity of the valuations.     

考虑预定时间限制的酒店客房定价决策

假定顾客是价格敏感的、房价的变化会带来需求的变化以及酒店可在预定期初调整价格策略以便影响市场需求将客房充分预售的条件下,给出了考虑预定时间限制的酒店客房定价决策模型,分析了最优房价、期望收益随预定时限的变化情况.     

A dynamic pricing approach for returned products in integrated forward/reverse logistics network design

During the last decade, the stringent pressures from environmental and social requirements have spurred an interest in designing a reverse logistics network. In this paper, we address the problem of designing and planning a multi-echelon, multi-period, multi-commodity and capacitated integrated forward/reverse logistics network. Returned products are categorized with respect to their quality levels, and a different acquisition price is offered for each return type. Furthermore, the reservation incentive of customers, the expected price of customers for one unit of used product described by uniform distribution, is applied to model the customers’ return willingness. Due to the fact that the remaining worthwhile value in the used products is the corporation’s key motivation for buying them from customers, a dynamic pricing approach is developed to determine the acquisition price for these products and based on it determine the percentage of returned products collected from customer zones. The used products’ acquisition prices at each time period are determined based on the customers’ return willingness by each collection center.     

运单体积不确定对货运共享平台定价决策的影响研究

货运共享平台订单分析显示顾客对运输货物申报的体积往往比实际体积偏大,平台则会按照客户申报的体积进行收费。本文站在平台利润视角,构建了考虑运单体积不确定的装载与配送路径联合优化模型来研究运单体积不确定对定价决策的影响,研究发现可以提升平台利润达24%。进一步,为了实现平台、顾客与司机的收益共享,并提高平台市场占有率,平台考虑在收费体积存在偏差的情况下,采用降价的策略与平台实际定价策略进行对比。通过数值分析发现,在存在体积偏差率的情况下,价格下降18%以内时,平台的利润呈现增长的趋势,最高可以达到23.26%;当价格下降超过18%时,平台利润出现负增长,因此不适合采取降价的措施。在降价过程中,顾客需要支付的成本最多可减少19.17%,司机的收益最多可增加13.82%,结果表明,采用新型分段定价策略可以更好的实现三方共赢,对平台的实际运营有一定的借鉴意义。     

Revenue management model for on-demand IT services

This paper presents a model for applying revenue management to on-demand IT services. The multinomial logit model is used to describe customer choice over multiple classes with different service-level agreements (SLAs). A nonlinear programming model is provided to determine the optimal price or service level for each class. Through a numerical analysis, we examine the impacts of system capacity and customer waiting incentives on the service provider’s profit and pricing strategies.