报告题目 (Title)：Revenue Management Under a Price Alert Mechanism （价格预警机制下的收益管理）

报告人 (Speaker)：江波 教授（上海财经大学信息管理与工程学院）

报告时间 (Time)：2023年11月7日 (周二) 14:00

报告地点 (Place)：校本部GJ303

邀请人(Inviter)：徐姿 教授

主办部门：理学院数学系

报告摘要：Many online platforms adopt a price alert mechanism to facilitate customers tracking the price changes. This mechanism allows customers to register their valuation to the system when they find the price is larger than the valuation on their arrival period. Once the price drops below the customers’ registered price, a message will be sent to notify them. In this paper, we study the optimal pricing problem under this mechanism. First,

when the customer's waiting time is one period, we show that it is optimal for the seller to use a threshold to decide whether to accept or reject a registered price, and the price trajectory under the optimal policy has a stochastic cyclic decreasing structure. When the customer’s valuation is a uniform distribution, the analytical form of the optimal policy is further obtained. When the customer’s patience level is two periods, we obtain the structure of the optimal policy by showing the asymmetric role each registered price plays in the optimal policy. Then we consider the case when the customer can stay in the system for an infinite number of periods. We derive an asymptotic optimal policy for this case. We find that adopting the price alert mechanism always increases social welfare; however, it may hurt the customer surplus when the seller has a large discount factor. Finally, we consider the case when the customers can strategically react to the price alert mechanism by timing their purchases and reporting false valuations. Using a Stackelberg’s game model, we obtain the seller’s optimal threshold type of policy. We show that the price alert mechanism can still be helpful to the seller, although the advantage diminishes when customers are very strategic.