Essays on pricing of cardinality bundles

This dissertation studies the pricing of cardinality bundles, where firms set prices that depend only on the size of the purchased bundle, a practice that is increasingly being adopted by industry. The first essay develops a fast combinatorial technique to obtain the optimal prices for cardinality bundles. The second essay extend the basic model to solve the problem when there exists fixed costs or economies of scale. The third essay relax a key assumption in cardinality bundling literature, which restricts each consumer to purchase no more than one bundle

Unbundling of Ancillary Service: How Does Price Discrimination of Main Service Matter?

We consider a setting where the firm sells a main service (e.g., air travel) and an ancillary service (e.g., baggage delivery) to two types of consumers (e.g., business travelers and leisure travelers). We study how the firm’s ability to charge discriminatory main service prices affects its decision of whether to unbundle the ancillary service from the main service and charge separate prices. Unlike a firm using uniform pricing of main service that unbundles the ancillary service if the consumers that value the main service higher have a high likelihood of purchasing the ancillary service, a firm using discriminatory pricing of main service unbundles the ancillary service if the consumers that value the main service higher have a low likelihood of purchasing the ancillary service. Moreover, discriminatory pricing of main service makes unbundling more (less) likely to be the optimal ancillary service strategy when consumers’ main service valuations and ancillary service valuations are negatively (positively) correlated. Finally, we characterize how firms’ use of main service price discrimination and consumers’ valuation structure (i.e., whether the correlation between consumers’ main service valuations and ancillary service valuations is positive or negative) jointly determine the ancillary service strategies in an industry.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117358/1/1301_Duenyas.pd

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia