Advance selling before the time of consumption is now possible for even very small service providers, given new technologies (specifically, web-based transactions, biometrics and smart card technology). Moreover, recent research has revealed that advance selling can substantially improve profits without traditional price discrimination. However, that research was limited to monopoly settings. T...

We study a dynamic pricing problem with finite inventory and parametric uncertainty on the demand distribution. Products are sold during selling seasons of finite length, and inventory that is unsold at the end of a selling season, perishes. The goal of the seller is to determine a pricing strategy that maximizes the expected revenue. Inference on the unknown parameters is made by maximum likel...

An unavoidable aspect of electronic commerce is the collection of personal information. Although personal information is paramount to improving services and designing personalized offerings, its collection and use also generates privacy concerns. This study analytically examines the optimal information collection and usage practices in the presence of privacy costs. We use an analytical model i...

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...