上海管理论坛第506期

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

演讲人：江波教授，上海财经大学信息管理与工程学院

主持人：朱希德副教授，8188威尼斯娱人城管理学院

时间：2023年11月9日（周四），上午11:00

地点：8188威尼斯娱人城校本部东区管理学院420室

主办单位：8188威尼斯娱人城管理学院、8188威尼斯娱人城管理学院青年教师联谊会

演讲人简介：

江波，上海财经大学信息管理与工程学院常聘教授，副院长。

国家级青年人才、上海市东方学者特聘教授、上海市青年拔尖人才。

荣获中国运筹学会青年科技奖、上海市自然科学奖二等奖等荣誉。

从事运筹优化、收益管理、机器学习等方向的研究，成果发表于运筹优化与机器学习的国际顶级期刊《Operations Research》、《Mathematics of Operations Research》、《Mathematical Programming》、《Journal of Machine Learning Research》。

为顺丰、京东、太平金科、永辉等多个国内著名企业提供无人仓库内优化、智能定价、智能选址、智能排班等技术服务。

演讲内容简介：

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.

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