Bid-prices are becoming an increasingly popular method for controlling the sale of inventory in revenue management applications. In this form of control, threshold---or "bid"---prices are set for the resources or units of inventory (seats on flight legs, hotel rooms on specific dates, etc.) and...

Customer choice behavior, such as buy-up and buy-down, is an important phenomenon in a wide range of revenue management contexts. Yet most revenue management methodologies ignore this phenomenon---or at best approximate it in a heuristic way. In this paper, we provide an exact and quite general...

We consider a rental firm with two types of customers. Contract customers pay fixed, prenegotiated rental fees and expect a high quality of service. Walk-in customers have no contractual relations with the firm and are "shopping for price." Given multiple contract and walk-in classes, the rental...

We analyze a dynamic auction, in which a seller with C units to sell faces a sequence of buyers separated into T time periods. Each group of buyers has independent, private values for a single unit. Buyers compete directly against each other within a period, as in a traditional auction, and...

In this paper, we study a regretful seller’s problem of selling a fixed number of goods over a finite and known time horizon. The seller engages in counterfactual thinking to compare her selected price with other forgone alternatives. If a forgone alternative (ex post) generates a better...

Research in psychology shows that consumption goals can help consumers avoid excessive consumption of vice goods and the associated long-term harm. In this paper, we propose a model of self-control with consumption goals and examine how goals moderate the behavior of consumers and the firm's...

We study a seller that starts with an initial inventory of goods, has a target horizon over which to sell the goods, and is subject to a set of financial <i>milestone</i> constraints on the revenues and sales that need to be achieved at different time points along the sales horizon. We characterize the...

Motivated by applications in financial services, we consider a seller who offers prices sequentially to a stream of potential customers, observing either success or failure in each sales attempt. The parameters of the underlying demand model are initially unknown, so each price decision involves...

We propose a game-theoretical model of a retailer who sells a limited inventory of a product over a finite selling season by using one of two inventory display formats: display all (DA) and display one (DO). Under DA, the retailer displays all available units so that each arriving customer has...

Dynamic pricing offers the potential to increase revenues. At the same time, it creates an incentive for customers to strategize over the timing of their purchases. A firm should ideally account for this behavior when making its pricing and stocking decisions. In particular, we investigate...