讲座题目：On the Efficacy of Static Prices for Revenue Management in the Face of Strategic Customers

主讲人：Chen Yiwei  教授  

主持人： 欧锦文     教授

时  间：2018年6月25日（周一）

下  午： 16：00 - 17：30

地  点：暨南大学管理学院 314室

讲座摘要：

The present paper considers a canonical revenue management problem wherein a monopolist seller seeks to maximize revenues from selling a fixed inventory of a product to customers who arrive over time. We assume that customers are forward looking and strategize on the timing of their purchase, an empirically confirmed aspect of modern customer behavior. In the event that customers were myopic, foundational work by Gallego and Van Ryzin [1994] established that static prices are asymptotically optimal for this problem. In stark contrast, for the case where customers are forward looking, available results in mechanism design and dynamic pricing suggest a substantially more complicated prescription, and are often constrained by restrictive assumptions on customer type.

The present paper studies this revenue management problem while assuming that customers are forward looking and strategic. We demonstrate that for a broad class of customer utility models, static prices surprisingly continue to remain asymptotically optimal in the regime where inventory and demand grow large. We further show that irrespective of regime, an optimally set static price guarantees the seller revenues that are within at least 63.2% of that under an optimal dynamic mechanism. The class of customer utility models we consider is parsimonious and enjoys empirical support. It subsumes many of the utility models considered for this problem in existing mechanism design research; we allow for multi-dimensional customer types. We also allow for a customer’s disutility from waiting to be positively correlated with his valuation. Our conclusions are thus robust and provide a simple prescription for a canonical RM problem that is near-optimal across a broad set of modeling assumptions.

This paper has been accepted by Management Science.

讲座人介绍：

Dr. Yiwei Chen is an Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design, Pillar of Engineering Systems and Design. He will be joining the University of Cincinnati, College of Business as an Assistant Professor in August 2018. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. from MIT Sloan School of Management. His primary research interests are revenue management and pricing, and sharing economy and innovative marketplaces. His papers have been published at Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological.

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