Air ticket sales revenue is an important source of revenue for travel agencies, and if future air ticket sales revenue can be accurately forecast, travel agencies will be able to advance procurement to achieve a sufficient amount of cost-effective tickets. Therefore, this study applied the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Genetic Algorithms (GA) to establish a prediction model of travel agen...

We consider a deterministic pricing and replenishment model in which the retailer advertises a fixed price and the selling schedule, and customers can advance or delay their time of purchase incurring holding or shortage costs. We investigate the impact of heterogeneity in the customers’ reservation prices. We show that the resulting optimal solution may be very different from that obtained whe...

Advance selling occurs when sellers allow buyers to purchase at a time preceding consumption (Shugan and Xie 2000). Electronic tickets, smart cards, online prepayments, and other technological advances make advance selling possible for many, if not all, service providers. These technologies lower the cost of making complex transactions at a greater distance from the seller’s site. They also giv...

Manufacturers make production decisions and carry inventory to satisfy uncertain demand. When holding and shortage costs are high, carrying inventory could be even more expensive for a capacitated production system. Recent developments in information technology and sales strategies enabled firms to acquire, collect, or induce advance demand information. We address a periodic-review, stochastic,...

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One possible explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behaviour towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. In this paper, we investigate the role of inventories in the Great Moderation by estimating an unobserved components model that identifie...

We look for means to advance the field of configuration systems via research that is performed rigorously and methodologically with the aim of theory creation. Specifically, we explore the use of Information Systems Design Theory (ISDT) as a framework for defining a design science theory for sales configurator construction. ISDT is the primary output of Design Science research that “shows the p...

This research explores the causes of dealer demand amplification leading to a high volume of seed returns in a typical agribusiness supply chain. Seed production occurs months in advance of grower demand, resulting in a limited supply of specific seeds. To hedge against shortages, dealers inflate orders. If demand materializes, dealers benefit from their inflationary behavior. If it does not, t...

Although Advance Selling and Probabilistic Selling differ in both motivation and implementation, we argue that they share a common characteristic—both offer consumers a choice involving buyer uncertainty. We develop a formal model to examine the general economics of purchase options that involve buyer uncertainty, explore the differences in buyer uncertainty created via these two strategies, an...

An economic order quantity model with backordering is investigated under a hybrid payment scheme. The payment scheme, which is also linked to order quantity, involves multiple advance payments as well as delayed payment. Incorporating this payment scheme can efficiently stimulate sales due to applying delayed payment; besides it provides the benefits of advance payment such as controlling the r...