Browsing by Subject "Dynamic pricing"
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Item Open Access A comparison of fixed and dynamic pricing policies in revenue management(2013) Şen, A.We consider the problem of selling a fixed capacity or inventory of items over a finite selling period. Earlier research has shown that using a properly set fixed price during the selling period is asymptotically optimal as the demand potential and capacity grow large and that dynamic pricing has only a secondary effect on revenues. However, additional revenue improvements through dynamic pricing can be important in practice and need to be further explored. We suggest two simple dynamic heuristics that continuously update prices based on remaining inventory and time in the selling period. The first heuristic is based on approximating the optimal expected revenue function and the second heuristic is based on the solution of the deterministic version of the problem. We show through a numerical study that the revenue impact of using these dynamic pricing heuristics rather than fixed pricing may be substantial. In particular, the first heuristic has a consistent and remarkable performance leading to at most 0.2% gap compared to optimal dynamic pricing. We also show that the benefits of these dynamic pricing heuristics persist under a periodic setting. This is especially true for the first heuristic for which the performance is monotone in the frequency of price changes. We conclude that dynamic pricing should be considered as a more favorable option in practice.Item Open Access Dynamic pricing under inventory considerations and price protection(Bilkent University, 2015-05) Yıldız, BarışIn high-tech industry, customers’ tendency to purchase the newest versions of products forces manufacturers to reduce the prices of older models. This puts the retailers in a vulnerable position as their own sales prices also decrease for these products. For this purpose, manufacturers and retailers compromise over different price commitment terms in their contracts. One such term is price protection. In general, a price protection term obliges a manufacturer refund a retailer a portion of the difference between the new and old wholesale prices for the inventory that the retailer have in stock and that are ordered within a time window. Sometimes, refunds may also be applied on products sold based on their sales price. We study a price protection contract over a finite horizon under stochastic demand. We have a single manufacturer and a single retailer, each endowed with a fixed amount of inventory at the beginning of the horizon. The manufacturer determines the retail price and neither manufacturing nor replenishment is allowed. The objective of the manufacturer is to set the retail price in each period given how much inventory is left at the manufacturer and the retailer. We analyze the structure of the model and provide some analytical results on the effect of different factors on optimal prices and optimal expected profits. Then, we present the results of a numerical study in which we further investigate the effect of different factors to obtain managerial insights.Item Open Access Exact solutions and heuristics for multi-product inventory pricing problem(Bilkent University, 2014) Çetin, OğuzWe study the multi-product inventory pricing problem under stochastic and price sensitive demand. We have initial inventory of m resources whose different combinations form n products. Products are perishable and need to be sold by a deadline. Demand for each product is modeled as a non-homogeneous Poisson process whose intensity is a function of the current price of the product itself. The aim is to set the price of each product over the selling period to maximize the expected revenue. This problem is faced in various industries including retail, airlines, automobile, apparel, hotels and car rentals. Our contributions are twofold. First, we provide a closed form solution for the special case of exponential price response where the elasticity parameter of the demand function of all products are equal. Second, we develop two classes of dynamic pricing heuristics: one using the value approximation approach of dynamic programming and the other using the deterministic version of the problem. Our numerical analysis indicates that dynamic pricing yields significantly higher revenues compared to fixed price policies. One of the dynamic pricing heuristics based on the deterministic problem provides around 5−15% additional revenue compared to fixed price policies. Moreover, two value approximation heuristics that we suggest result in at most ∼ 0.5% and ∼ 3.4% gaps in the expected revenue compared to the optimal dynamic pricing policy for general form of exponential price response. These additional revenues can have a profound effect on the profitability of firms, so dynamic pricing should be preferred over fixed price policies in practice.Item Open Access Performance bounds on optimal fixed prices(2013) Şen, A.We consider the problem of selling a fixed stock of items over a finite horizon when the buyers arrive following a Poisson process. We obtain a general lower bound on the performance of using a fixed price rather than dynamically adjusting the price. The bound is 63.21% for one unit of inventory, and it improves as the inventory increases. For the one-unit case, we also obtain tight bounds: 89.85% for the constant-elasticity and 96.93% for the linear price-response functions.