Blind Network Revenue Management

Wait Time Based Pricing for Queues with Customer-Chosen Service Times

Optimal pricing and inventory strategies for fashion products under time-dependent interest rate and demand

We consider a dynamic pricing model for selling a given stock of a perishable product over a finite time horizon. Customers, whose reservation price distribution changes over time, arrive according to a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. We show that at any given time, the optimal price decreases with inventory. We also identify a sufficient condition under which the optimal price decreases over time for a given inventory level. This sufficient condition requires that the willingness of a customer to pay a premium for the product does not increase over time. In addition to shedding managerial insight, these structural properties enable efficient computation of the optimal policy. Numerical studies are conducted to show the revenue impact of dynamic price policies. Price changes are set to compensate for statistical fluctuations of demand and to respond to shifts of the reservation price. For the former, our examples show that using optimal dynamic optimal policies achieves 2.4–7.3% revenue improvement over the optimal single price policy. For the latter, the revenue increase can be as high as 100%. These results explain why yield management has become so essential to fashion retailing and travel service industries.

Optimal peak load pricing with time-additive consumer preferences

It is common for a firm to make use of multiple suppliers of different delivery lead times, reliabilities, and costs. In this study, we are concerned with the joint pricing and inventory control problem for such a firm that has a quick‐response supplier and a regular supplier that both suffer random disruptions, and faces price‐sensitive random demands. We aim at characterizing the optimal ordering and pricing policies in each period over a planning horizon, and analyzing the impacts of supply source diversification. We show that, when both suppliers are unreliable, the optimal inventory policy in each period is a reorder point policy and the optimal price is decreasing in the starting inventory level in that period. In addition, we show that having supply source diversification or higher supplier reliability increases the firm's optimal profit and lowers the optimal selling price. We also demonstrate that, with the selling price as a decision, a supplier may receive even more orders from the firm after an additional supplier is introduced. For the special case where the quick‐response supplier is perfectly reliable, we further show that the optimal inventory policy is of a base‐stock type and the optimal pricing policy is a list‐price policy with markdowns.

This article studies the implications of experience curves and brand loyalty for optimal dynamic pricing policy. In a continuous time model, we synthesize several results from the literature on open loop equilibria. Specifically, we show that prices should decrease over time for high discount rates and steeper exogenous declines in variable costs. Conversely, the prices should increase over time if experience curves affect fixed costs and if consumers are brand loyal.

We study dynamic pricing and inventory control of substitute products for a retailer who faces a long supply lead time and a short selling season. Within a multinomial logit model of consumer choice over substitutes, we develop a stochastic dynamic programming formulation and derive the optimal dynamic pricing policy. We prove that dynamic pricing converges to static pricing as inventory levels of all variates approach the number of remaining selling periods (assuming at most one customer arrival within each period). Our extensive numerical study of the effects of time and inventory depletion on the optimal pricing reveals two fundamental underlying driving forces of the complex price behavior: the level of inventory scarcity and the quality difference among products. We also compare the performance of three restricted pricing strategies: static, unified dynamic, and mixed dynamic pricing. We find that full-scale dynamic pricing is of great value in the presence of inventory scarcity, and initial inventory decisions are quite robust in the pricing scheme employed in the selling season. Based on the above insights, we propose a computationally efficient approach to the initial inventory decision, which delivers close-to-optimal inventory levels for all testing cases.

Problem definition: We consider the dynamic pricing problem of multiple products under (asymmetric) reference effects over an infinite horizon. Unlike existing literature, which is mostly focused on the single-product setting, our multiproduct setting takes into account the cross-product effects among substitutes and incorporates the memory-based reference prices into the multinomial logit (MNL) demand model. Even with the single-product logit demand, the structure of the optimal pricing policy is intractable. Therefore, we focus on the long-run patterns of the optimal pricing policy and also discuss the performance of the myopic pricing policy. Methodology/results: We first provide a comprehensive characterization of the myopic pricing policy, including its solution, long-run convergence behavior, and optimality gap. For the optimal pricing policy, we show an intricate connection between its long-run dynamics and types of reference effects. We demonstrate that the presence of any gain-seeking product renders a long-run constant pricing policy suboptimal. Conversely, the constant policy (or optimal steady state) can exist in both loss-neutral and loss-averse scenarios, where we provide a sufficient condition for such existence and give the analytical expression for the optimal steady state. We further show that when pricing perfect substitutes, the true optimal policy under the multiproduct framework is more likely to yield a long-run cyclic pattern than the policy derived from the single-product framework, a phenomenon that aligns well with the periodic discounts in real-world markets. Managerial implications: This discrepancy in the long-run behaviors between multi- and single-product-based policies highlights the importance of employing the multiproduct framework and addressing the cross-product effects, as sticking to the single-product framework while managing multiple substitutes can misrepresent long-run dynamics and result in suboptimality. In the multiproduct domain, our model suggests that retailers are more likely to benefit from appropriate price variations than maintaining a constant pricing policy. Funding: H. Jiang acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN 2024 05796]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2024.0801 .

The Journal of FinanceVolume 41, Issue 5 p. 1141-1148 Note A Note on Optimal Credit and Pricing Policy under Uncertainty: A Contingent-Claims Approach CHUN H. LAM, CHUN H. LAMSearch for more papers by this authorANDREW H. CHEN, ANDREW H. CHEN Both authors from Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University. We are indebted to the comments and suggestions of Chris Barry, Sam Dennis, and two anonymous referees on earlier versions of the paper. The authors also acknowledge the financial support from the Center for the Study of Financial Institutions and Markets at Southern Methodist University.Search for more papers by this author CHUN H. LAM, CHUN H. LAMSearch for more papers by this authorANDREW H. CHEN, ANDREW H. CHEN Both authors from Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University. We are indebted to the comments and suggestions of Chris Barry, Sam Dennis, and two anonymous referees on earlier versions of the paper. The authors also acknowledge the financial support from the Center for the Study of Financial Institutions and Markets at Southern Methodist University.Search for more papers by this author First published: December 1986 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb02536.xCitations: 3 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume41, Issue5December 1986Pages 1141-1148 RelatedInformation

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In the real world, the demand cannot be depicted exactly because of customer behavior cannot be forecasted without error. In this paper, we study the effect of the error of the estimated price-demand parameters by analyzing the sensitivity of the optimal joint pricing and ordering policy on the price-demand parameters based on a periodic-review, multi-period and lost sale inventory model for perishable products with constant quantity decay rate and price-sensitive demand. Firstly, we formulate the joint pricing and inventory control problem and find the optimal ordering quantity and the optimal price for deterministic price-demand function. The optimal solutions show that the retailer tends to set a lower price in early periods of each ordering cycle in order to reduce the inventory holding costs. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the optimal joint pricing and inventory control system with respect to the price-demand parameters is examined analytically and evaluated numerically. The sensitivity analysis reveals that compared to the optimal ordering quantity, the optimal prices are less sensitive in the demand-price parameters. Finally, according to the findings of the sensitivity analysis, a heuristic method of regulating the estimated demand-price parameters is employed to improve the average profit. <b>185</b> words.</p>

Optimal ordering and pricing policy for demand functions that are separable into price and inventory age

Pricing and replenishment policies in dual-channel supply chain under continuous unit cost decrease

Designing Shipping Policies with Top-up Options to Qualify for Free Delivery

Dynamic Pricing of Relocating Resources in Large Networks

Fair and profitable: How pricing and lead-time quotation policies can help