We investigate a simple adaptive approach to optimizing seat protection levels in airline revenue management systems. The approach uses only historical observations of the relative frequencies of certain seat-filling events to guide direct adjustments of the seat protection levels in accordance with the optimality conditions of Brumelle and McGill (1993). Stochastic approximation theory is used...

Revenue management is the process of actively managing inventory or capacity to maximize revenues. The active management typically occurs through managerial levers such as price, promotion or availability. We present a novel real options approach to revenue management that is specifically suited to the car rental business. We illustrate the concept with actual car rental data. The model produce...

We introduce and analyze an inter-temporal choice model where customer valuations are uncertain and evolve over time. The model leads directly to the study of call options on capacity that are similar to partially refundable fares. We show that the capacity provider earns significantly higher revenues by selling real options on capacity than low-to-high pricing. We also investigate the social i...

Lean methodologies are increasingly deployed by healthcare providers to improve billing and collection process in revenue cycle management. Measurement on key performance metrics generates large amount of data. Traditional tabular and spreadsheet form analytics are not efficient to support enterprise scale lean improvement sustainability. This paper introduces a new breed of visual dashboard te...

We consider a dynamic pricing model in which the instantaneous rate of the demand arrival process is dependent on not only the current price charged by the concerned firm, but also the present state of the world. While reflecting the current economic condition, the state evolves in a Markovian fashion. This model represents the real-life situation in which the sales season is relatively long co...

In the Internet, where millions of users are a click away from your site, being able to dynamically classify the workload in real-time is crucial for proper self-management and business efficiency. When server resources are exceeded, admission control systems are necessary to avoid denial of service and maintain high throughput in terms of properly finished sessions; this approach, however, doe...

Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities with the sole purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption vs. investment trade-off. Investment corresponds to the allocation of capacity for revenue customers, while consumption corresponds to serving mission customers. We model this problem as a multi-period...

The emergence of budget airlines, the advent of new sales channels, the disappearance of traditional fare-class fences, and other on-going changes in the airline industry pose serious challenges to traditional revenue management models, which make some rigid and unrealistic assumptions. One of these is that passengers who do not get the fare they want book and travel on other airlines or do not...

This paper studies joint pricing and remanufacturing strategy of a firm that decides to offer both new and remanufactured versions of its product in the market. In making this decision, the firm balances the additional revenue from selling remanufactured products, the demand cannibalization of new product sales, and the cost of remanufacturing. We present the model of the firm’s decisions and c...