Smart Pricing: Linking Pricing Decisions with Operational Insights

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion of information about customers and their preferences. This information potentially allows companies to increase their revenues, in particular since modern technology enables price changes to be effected at minimal cost. At the same time, companies have taken major strides in understanding and managing the dynamics of the supply chain, both their internal operations and their relationships with supply chain partners. These two developments are narrowly intertwined. Pricing decisions have a direct effect on operations and visa versa. Yet, the systematic integration of operational and marketing insights is in an emerging stage, both in academia and in business practice. This article reviews a number of key linkages between pricing and operations. In particular, it highlights different drivers for dynamic pricing strategies. Through the discussion of key references and related software developments we aim to provide a snapshot into a rich and evolving field.supply chain management;inventory;capacity;dynamic pricing;operations-marketing interface

Lot Sizing Optimisation for Stochastic Make-to-order Manufacturing

Lot sizing is pivotal to batch manufacturing, especially in stochastic environments. Although progress has been made in the field for some operational objectives, the optimised results are often rendered unrealistic because few studies have considered the overall business goal and the economic environment where businesses operate. This paper examines a stochastic lot sizing optimisation model for make-to-order manufacturing with a focus on the overall business goal—the maximisation of shareholder wealth. In addition to the economic objective, the effect of the economic environment is also incorporated into this model. Numerical experiments validate the importance of considering such economic and financial constraints and objectives, especially for firms with relatively high setup costs or being sensitive to lead times. The proposed model can assist the management in gaining insight into potential challenges and opportunities pertinent to the shareholder wealth.published_or_final_versio

Stochastic multi-item lot sizing for the shareholder wealth maximisation

This LNECS vol. entitled: World Congress on Engineering : WCE 2013The multi-item stochastic lot sizing issue is pivotal to batch manufacturing. Despite recent advances made in this field, the optimisation result is often rendered impractical, for little attention has been paid to corporate capital structures and the overall business goal—shareholder wealth maximisation. We attempt to address this issue by focusing on stochastic multi-item lot sizing for manufacturing in a complex yet realistic capital structure to realize the overall business objective. Our study considers an array of economical parameters for maximisation of the shareholder wealth, and also examines the impact of capital structure. Computational studies are presented to demonstrate the important implications of our proposed model on gaining corporate wealth in a practical capital structure.postprin

Smart Pricing: Linking Pricing Decisions with Operational Insights

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion of information about customers and their preferences. This information potentially allows companies to increase their revenues, in particular since modern technology enables price changes to be effected at minimal cost. At the same time, companies have taken major strides in understanding and managing the dynamics of the supply chain, both their internal operations and their relationships with supply chain partners. These two developments are narrowly intertwined. Pricing decisions have a direct effect on operations and visa versa. Yet, the systematic integration of operational and marketing insights is in an emerging stage, both in academia and in business practice. This article reviews a number of key linkages between pricing and operations. In particular, it highlights different drivers for dynamic pricing strategies. Through the discussion of key references and related software developments we aim to provide a snapshot into a rich and evolving field

Establishing Nash equilibrium of the manufacturer-supplier game in supply chain management

We study a game model of multi-leader and one-follower in supply chain optimization where n suppliers compete to provide a single product for a manufacturer. We regard the selling price of each supplier as a pre-determined parameter and consider the case that suppliers compete on the basis of delivery frequency to the manufacturer. Each supplier’s profit depends not only on its own delivery frequency, but also on other suppliers’ frequencies through their impact on manufacturer’s purchase allocation to the suppliers. We first solve the follower’s (manufacturer’s) purchase allocation problem by deducing an explicit formula of its solution. We then formulate the n leaders’ (suppliers’) game as a generalized Nash game with shared constraints, which is theoretically difficult, but in our case could be solved numerically by converting to a regular variational inequality problem. For the special case that the selling prices of all suppliers are identical, we provide a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium. An explicit formula of the Nash equilibrium is obtained and its local uniqueness property is proved

Service Co-Production, Customer Efficiency and Market Competition

Customers’ participation in service co-production processes has been increasing with the rapid development of self-service technologies and business models that rely on self-service as the main service delivery channel. However, little is known about how the level of participation of customers in service delivery processes influences the competition among service providers. In this paper, a game-theoretic model is developed to study the competition among service providers when selfservice is an option. The analysis of the equilibria from this model shows that, given a certain level of customer efficiency, the proportion of the service task outsourced to the customer is a decisive factor in the resulting competitive equilibria. In the long run, two extreme formats of service delivery are expected to prevail rather than any mixture of both: either complete employee service or complete self-service. In the two-firm queuing game, we find that both firms are better off when they both deliver their service through self-service. It is also shown that full-service providers dominate the market if firms providing service products featuring self-service fail to have enough market demand at a profitable price. Meanwhile, the limited ranges of customer efficiency and the price for the self-service-only product are shown to be essential conditions for the coexistence of the different types of service providers.

Study of Client Reject Policies under Lead-Time and Price Dependent Demand

Delivery lead-time has become a factor of competitiveness for companies and an important criterion of purchase for the customers today. Thus, in order to increase their profit, companies must not focus only on price but also need to quote the right delivery lead time to their customers. Some authors to find a way in quoting the right delivery lead-time while considering an M/M/1 system. In M/M/1, all customers are accepted. This can lead to longer lead times in the queue. Firms can react by quoting longer lead times in order to cope with this situation. However, this leads to lower demand and revenue. Starting from this observation, we investigate in this paper whether a customer rejection policy can be more beneficial for the firm than an all-customers’ acceptance policy. Indeed, our idea is based on the fact that rejecting some customers might help to quote shorter lead time for the accepted customers, which might lead to higher demand and profit. We model this rejection policy based on an M/M/1/K system. We analytically determine the optimal firm’s policy (optimal price and quoted lead time) in case of M/M/1/1 system. Then, we compare the optimal firm’s profit under M/M/1/1 with the optimal profit obtained by M/M/1. Two situations are considered: a system without holding and penalty costs and a system where these costs are included

Research Opportunities in Service Process Design

This paper presents an overview of the new issues and research opportunities related to four service operations design topics—the design of retail and e-tail service processes, design of service processes involving waiting lines and workforce staffing, service design for manufacturing, and re-engineering service processes. All four topics are motivated by new technologies (particularly web-based technologies) and require a multi-disciplinary approach to research. For each topic, the paper presents an overview of the topic, the relevant frameworks, and a discussion of the research opportunities

Integrating the Core: A New Management Curriculum to Empower our Students

This paper follows Kennesaw State University\u27s (KSU) faculty journal in developing a new integrated core curriculum for their Management majors that will empower the students and meet the needs of today\u27s employers. Curriculums must change to stay current. Depending on the amount of change, this can be a huge undertaking for a department ensconced in an existing curriculum paradigm, and can be met with resistance. In this paper we look for answers to: 1) Why is the change necessary? 2) What are we changing to? We will follow up with some thoughts about 3) how will we make these changes

Pricing Digital Goods: Discontinuous Costs and Shared Infrastructure

We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products with discontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number of information technology-based products and services for which variable increases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of 'blocks' of computing or network infrastructure. Examples include internet service, telephony, online trading, on-demand software, digital music, streamed video-on-demand and grid computing. These goods are often modeled as information goods with variable costs of zero, although their actual cost structure features a mixture of positive periodic fixed costs, and zero marginal costs. The pricing of such goods is further complicated by the fact that rapid advances in semiconductor and networking technology lead to sustained rapid declines in the cost of new infrastructure over time. Furthermore, this infrastructure is often shared across multiple goods and services in distinct markets. The main contribution of this paper is a general solution for the optimal nonlinear pricing of such digital goods and services. We show that this can be formulated as a finite series of more conventional constrained pricing problems. We then establish that the optimal nonlinear pricing schedule with discontinuous supply functions coincides with the solution to one specific constrained problem, reduce the former to a problem of identifying the optimal number of 'blocks' of demand that the seller will fulfil under their optimal pricing schedule, and show how to identify this optimal number using a simple and intuitive rule (which is analogous to 'balancing' the marginal revenue with average 'marginal cost'). We discuss the extent to which using 'information-goods' pricing schedules rather than those that are optimal reduce profits for sellers of digital goods. A first extension includes the rapidly declining infrastructure costs associated with Moore's Law to provide insight into the relationship between the magnitude of cost declines, infrastructure planning and pricing strategy. A second extension examines multi-market pricing of a set of digital goods and services whose supply is fulfilled by a shared infrastructure. Our paper provides a new pricing model which is widely applicable to IT, network and electronic commerce products. It also makes an independent contribution to the theory of second-degree price discrimination, by providing the first solution of monopoly screening when costs are discontinuous, and when costs incurred can only be associated with the total demand fulfilled, rather than demand from individual customers.We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products with discontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number of information technology-based products and services for which variable increases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of 'blocks' of computing or network infrastructure. Examples include internet service, telephony, online trading, on-demand software, digital music, streamed video-on-demand and grid computing. These goods are often modeled as information goods with variable costs of zero, although their actual cost structure features a mixture of positive periodic fixed costs, and zero marginal costs. The pricing of such goods is further complicated by the fact that rapid advances in semiconductor and networking technology lead to sustained rapid declines in the cost of new infrastructure over time. Furthermore, this infrastructure is often shared across multiple goods and services in distinct markets. The main contribution of this paper is a general solution for the optimal nonlinear pricing of such digital goods and services. We show that this can be formulated as a finite series of more conventional constrained pricing problems. We then establish that the optimal nonlinear pricing schedule with discontinuous supply functions coincides with the solution to one specific constrained problem, reduce the former to a problem of identifying the optimal number of 'locks' of demand that the seller will fulfil under their optimal pricing schedule, and show how to identify this optimal number using a simple and intuitive rule (which is analogous to 'balancing' the marginal revenue with average 'marginal cost'). We discuss the extent to which using 'information-goods' pricing schedules rather than those that are optimal reduce profits for sellers of digital goods. A first extension includes the rapidly declining infrastructure costs associated with Moore's Law to provide insight into the relationship between the magnitude of cost declines, infrastructure planning and pricing strategy. A second extension examines multi-market pricing of a set of digital goods and services whose supply is fulfilled by a shared infrastructure. Our paper provides a new pricing model which is widely applicable to IT, network and electronic commerce products. It also makes an independent contribution to the theory of second-degree price discrimination, by providing the first solution of monopoly screening when costs are discontinuous, and when costs incurred can only be associated with the total demand fulfilled, rather than demand from individual customers