While flexible products have been popular for many years in practice, they have only recently gained attention in the academic literature on revenue management. When selling a flexible product, a firm retains the right to specify some of its details later. The relevant point in time is after the sale, but often before the provision of the product or service, depending on the customers' need to know the exact specification in advance. The resulting flexibility can help to increase revenues if capacity is fixed and the demand to come difficult to forecast. We present several revenue management models and control mechanisms incorporating this kind of flexible products. An extensive numerical study shows how the different approaches can mitigate the negative impact of demand forecast errors.
This paper provides an overview of the literature on dynamic pricing with strategic customers. In the past, research on dynamic pricing was mostly concerned with optimally pricing products over time in a market with myopic customers. In recent years, the consideration of strategic customers, who can delay a purchase to take advantage of a future discount, has dramatically increased. This paper's main contribution is the development of a comprehensive classification scheme to structure the field of research and, based upon this, a systematic overview of all relevant papers. We then present in detail the various aspects considered in the literature together with their motivation from industry and state the major findings of the most relevant papers. Further attention is given to important problem extensions proposed in the literature that have been considered in only a few papers and are usually motivated by specific practical applications. Finally, promising directions for future research are indicated.
Product reclamation is a critical process in remanufacturing. It is generally assumed in the literature that customers simply want to get rid of their used products without expecting any compensation for them. Some authors have only recently started looking into firms that offer a posted (fixed) price for them. Following recent reports suggesting that customers are increasingly open to bargaining, we compare using a posted price and bargaining to obtain used products. In our analysis, we consider an original manufacturer acting as a monopolist as well as a manufacturer and an independent remanufacturer acting in a duopoly. We analytically show that bargaining is always beneficial to the monopoly manufacturer. In the duopoly case, we distinguish a Cournot competition and a market with the manufacturer as Stackelberg leader. The results of a numerical study show that both firms will use posted pricing in the Cournot competition, especially if bargaining is not costless. By contrast, the remanufacturer can significantly increase his profit by using negotiations if he is the Stackelberg follower.
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