Revenue Management with Forward-Looking Buyers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Board, Simon; Skrzypacz, Andrzej
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/686713
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1046-1087
• 关键词: Mechanism design; demand; DYNAMICS; auctions; MARKETS; search

摘要

A seller wishes to sell multiple goods by a deadline, for example, the end of a season. Potential buyers enter over time and can strategically time their purchases. Each period, the profit-maximizing mechanism awards units to the buyers with the highest valuations exceeding a sequence of cutoffs. We show that these cutoffs are deterministic, depending only on the inventory and time remaining; in the continuous-time limit, the optimal mechanism can be implemented by posting anonymous prices. When incoming demand decreases over time, the optimal cutoffs satisfy a one-period-look-ahead property and prices are defined by an intuitive differential equation.