Revenue management by sequential screening

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Akan, Mustafa; Ata, Baris; Dana, James D., Jr.
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University; University of Chicago; Northeastern University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2015.07.016
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 728-774
• 关键词: Price discrimination; revenue management; Dynamic pricing; Intertemporal price discrimination; dynamic mechanism design

摘要

Using a mechanism design approach, we consider a firm's optimal pricing policy when consumers are heterogeneous and learn their valuations at different times. We show that by offering a menu of advance-purchase contracts that differ in when, and for how much, the product can be returned, a firm can more easily price discriminate between privately-informed consumers. In particular, we show that screening on when the return option can be exercised increases firm profits, relative to screening on the size of the refund alone, only if the expected gains from trade are higher for consumers who learn later. We show that in some settings (mean-preserving spread) the firm can achieve the complete-information profits and analyze the optimal contract in other settings (first-order stochastic dominance) in which the first-best allocation is not always feasible. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.