Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management最新文献

Subscription models where consumers pay fixed (monthly) fees for access to services are becoming increasingly popular across a wider set of service offerings as firms look for ways to stabilize revenues. Lodging subscription services are natural and flexible extensions of timeshare models whereby consumers pay monthly subscriptions fees to get access to a wide variety of stay options. The value of the subscription service may be difficult for consumers to evaluate and hence limit adoption. This study demonstrates that service providers can assist consumers in maximizing use of their subscription through addition of simple sort functionality or via more robust optimization approaches. Using synthetic data as well as data from a lodging subscription provider, we develop approaches for consumers to maximize their use of the subscription service - we compare and contrast optimal approaches to readily deployed heuristic approaches.

We study an assortment problem under the multinomial logit model with two new types of group constraints that are motivated by a joint project with the German car manufacturer BMW. Under group constraints, products are either attributed to exactly one group or to several groups at once and there is either a bound on the number of products offered per group or on the number of groups from which products are offered. We formulate both optimization problems as binary fractional linear program and provide reformulations that can be solved using state-of-the-art solvers. Finally, we conduct a numerical study and find that all instances of the products-per-group constrained problem as well as small to medium size instances of the number-of-offered-groups constrained problem can be solved within fractions of a second, whereas large instances of the latter problem might take some seconds to be solved.

Competitive Revenue Management has been practiced in the airline and hotel travel verticals for over two decades. Leveraging the selling fares and rates of competitors as input into the revenue management systems improves inventory control recommendations that is reflective of prevailing market conditions. Recently, several class action lawsuits have appeared against casino-hotel operators who use automated revenue management software to recommend the best available rates. This has attracted the attention of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission who are investigating anti-competitive practices of casino-hotel operators. While Competitive Revenue Management is an established business process in the travel industry, this brings up the issue of the future of this revenue management practice in travel.

This paper studies the opaque selling strategy for a parallel-flight airline based on a newsvendor model with stochastic demand. The optimal pricing decision and capacity allocation policy are obtained and analyzed subject to necessary assumptions. There is a relationship between the optimal allocated capacities of these flights, and the airline can adjust its capacity allocation decisions according to this relationship. In addition, the airline is suggested to allocate more capacity for opaque seats if the demand variance is high or the difference in consumer’s preferences between flights is small; meanwhile, a lower price for opaque seats will be provided when the variance is high or the difference is large. Numerical experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the opaque selling strategy, and the results indicate that this strategy brings a 1.09% revenue increment on average compared to the conventional strategy.

In today’s hotel industry, increasingly more hotels offer additional options on their booking websites, such as “book now, pay later.” Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, methods to present this option more effectively have received limited attention. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design, this research examines how appeal type (attribute versus benefit appeals) and temporal distance (i.e., time of booking) jointly influence evaluations of the “pay later” option; it also investigates whether the joint effect has a boundary condition. The results demonstrated that leisure travelers planning a trip in the near future had more positive attitudes and greater purchase intentions when the “pay later” option was presented via an attribute appeal rather than a benefit appeal. However, leisure travelers planning a trip in the distant future did not exhibit such differences in attitudes and purchase intentions. Furthermore, this research revealed that the joint effect of appeal type and temporal distance was evident only for leisure travelers but not for business travelers.

Strategic levers play a fundamental role in revenue management (RM). Earlier research has established price, time, and space as the three levers businesses can wield to optimize performance, but a synthesis of all three is missing. This article presents a three-dimensional model of revenue management levers that categorizes industries in eight octants, visualized as the cube of RM levers. The cube sharpens RM theory and helps companies to identify new opportunities for revenue optimization through comparison with other businesses within their octant. Similarly, it facilitates evaluating possibilities of moving to another octant. Finally, the cube can also assist businesses new to RM to apply strategic levers, address RM collaboration challenges in tourism destinations, and contribute to education in the field.

We investigate the influence of market competition heterogeneity across package sizes on a firm’s pricing strategy. We focus on the transition from quantity discounts (common practice) to quantity surcharges (charging more for larger packages) and hypothesise that firms adopt surcharges when competition is significantly higher in the smaller-package market. Using a survey of 38 grocery stores, we find that the adoption of surcharges rises alongside substantial disparities in competition between sizes, as measured by brand availability. We posit that varying demand elasticities between pack sizes, driven by heterogeneous consumer preferences, may underpin this competition divergence and subsequent pricing strategy shifts. Our findings contribute to the understanding of pricing dynamics under asymmetric competition and offer insights for firms navigating competitive landscapes across product formats.

Recently, price leadership in supermarkets has become a subject of extensive research. In our study, we utilize the Generalized Seaton–Waterson (GSW) method, but with a unique approach based on Granger causality networks. As it naturally captures statistically significant price variation sequences, the multiple interactions observed by a network present dimensions hardly observed when studying pairwise relations. Our investigation centers on retail tea product data from three stores in Argentina. The results highlight numerous significant leader–follower relationships, primarily associated with Black tea options and brand interactions. We distinguish two main brands in the market as segment leaders. This insight sheds light on the dynamics of price leadership within the retail tea market and provides valuable information for market participants and researchers alike.