Essays in Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing Soheil Yousef Sibdari Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial and Systems Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Dr. Kyle Y. Lin, Chair In this dissertation, I study two topics in the context of revenue management. The first topic involves building a mathematical model to analyze the competition between many retailers who can ...

A major requirement of today’s online shops is the availability of competent virtual sales agents that guide the customers through the vast space of available products, services, and other opportunities. This function is mostly implemented by search agents that should help customers to find relevant product information. While these search functions are considered quite important by the online s...

Ramshankar.R Independent Researcher MS(ECE), University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA Ramanarayanan.R Professor of Mathematics (Retired) Veltech Group of Institutions, Chennai India . ABSTRACT: This paper studies two stochastic Models (A) and (B) with bulk production and bulk sales of products with catastrophe. The system has infinite storing capacity and the production and sales sizes are ...

A number of previous studies have shown that a combination of forecasts typically outperforms any component forecast. Service managers may wish to use forecast combination to improve forecast accuracy in predicting retail sales. In this study, revenue data from an actual service company is used to generate and test a least absolute value (LAV) regression model for forecast combination. The LAV ...

Using data on mobile phone handset sales from a single retail store, we examine the impact of different retail responsibility designations and vertical contracts on seller service provision, firm profitability, and social welfare. During our sample, this store switched from retailer-managed retailing with linear pricing contracts to manufacturermanaged retailing with revenue sharing. We estimat...

Additional gold can be made available either by mining at high cost (approximately $250 per ounce in 1997 dollars) or by mobilizing government stocks at zero cost. Governments own massive above-ground stocks but loan out only a small percentage of these stocks. Making all government gold available for private uses immediately through some combination of sales and loans maximizes total welfare f...

Field service is gaining importance as after sales service is starting to be recognized as a major source of revenue. This motivates planning problems for companies that employ mobile technicians who provide service on clients’ sites. These planning problems share the common characteristic that service levels corresponding to technician response times are explicitly expressed in contracts. More...

We apply Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) to image sequences generated from natural images using a range of spatial transformations. An analysis of the resulting receptive fields shows that they have a rich spectrum of invariances and share many properties with complex and hypercomplex cells of the primary visual cortex. Furthermore, the dependence of the solutions on the statistics of the transform...

Due to the strong competition that exists today, most manufacturing organizations are in a continuous effort for increasing their profits and reducing their costs. Accurate sales forecasting is certainly an inexpensive way to meet the aforementioned goals, since this leads to improved customer service, reduced lost sales and product returns and more efficient production planning. Especially for...

This paper investigates the effect of Internet car referral services on dealer pricing of automobiles in California. Combining data from J.D. Power and Associates and Autobytel.com, a major online auto referral service, we compare online transaction prices to regular “street” prices. We find that the average customer of this online service pays approximately 2% less for her car, which correspon...