We study the joint inventory and sales effort management problems of a retailer in a broad context and investigate the optimal policies for a single item, periodic-review system. In each period, the demand is uncertain depending on the sales effort level exerted by the retailer, which incurs an associated cost. The retailer’s objective is to find a joint optimal inventory replenishment and sale...

The Internet has brought consumers increased access to information to make purchase decisions. As markets come closer to perfect information, one of the expected outcomes is an increase in competition. One of the consequences is an increase in the price elasticity of demand, or the percent change in demand due to a percent change in price, because consumers are better able to compare offerings ...

A majority of surveyed consumers claim to prefer ethically certified products over non-certified alternatives, and to be willing to pay a price premium for such products. There is no clear evidence, however, that people actually seek out such ethically certified goods and pay a premium for them when shopping. We provide new evidence on consumer behavior from experiments conducted in a major U.S...

We present a model of price leadership on homogeneous product markets where the price leader is selected endogenously. The price leader sets and guarantees a sales price to which followers can adjust according to their individual supply functions. The price leader then clears the market by serving the residual demand. Firms with different marginal costs would induce different prices if they wer...

Marriott International’s Group Pricing Optimizer (GPO), a decision support system, provides guidance to Marriott personnel on pricing hotel rooms for group customers. GPO uses demand segmentation, price-elasticity modeling, and optimization techniques to recommend an optimal rate. In operation since late 2006, the system has improved Marriott’s hotel profitability and enhanced the sales process...

this paper studies the dynamic behavior of price elasticity and its effects on the overall profit. although price elasticity has a significant effect on sales, its dynamics have not been examined so far in pricing models. in this paper, a simple pricing model is suggested in which, price elasticity is considered dynamic. the suggested pricing model is concerned with a monopolist that its object...

Achannel rebate is a payment from a manufacturer to a retailer based on retailer sales to end consumers. Two common forms of channel rebates are linear rebates, in which the rebate is paid for each unit sold, and target rebates, in which the rebate is paid for each unit sold beyond a specified target level. When demand is not influenced by sales effort, a properly designed target rebate achieve...

C a retailer who sells perishable seasonal products with uncertain demand. Due to the short sales season and long replenishment lead times associated with such products, the retailer is unable to update demand forecasts by using actual sales data generated from the early part of the season and to respond by replenishing stocks during the season. To overcome this limitation, we examine the case ...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product whose demand distribution in each period is determined both by whether or not a sale price is offered in the current period, and the number of periods since the last time the sale price was offered. We show that optimal inventory ordering policy is a state dependent base stock policy; however, the optimal pricing p...

From the perspective of product uncertainty, the effect of product type, product price and sales on buyer’s online payment method choice was explored with a 2 price levels (high vs. low) × 2 sales levels (high vs. low) × 2 product types (experience vs. search) within-subjects eye-tracking experiment. Thirty voluntary participants from Zhejiang University participated in the experiment. The dete...