86 research outputs found
Optimal capacity rationing policy for a container leasing system with multiple kinds of customers and substitutable containers
This is the final version. Available from the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences via the DOI in this record.âŻIn this paper, we consider a container leasing firm that has elementary and premium containers, which are downward substitutable and for use by elementary contract customers (ECCs), premium contract customers (PCCs), as well as walk-in customers (WICs).
ECCs can be satisfied by elementary containers or premium ones at discounted prices while
PCCs only accept premium containers. WICs can be satisfied by any type of container at different prices. The objective is to maximise the expected total rental revenue by managing its limited capacity. We formulate this problem as a discrete-time Markov Decision Process and show
the submodularity and concavity of the value function. Based on this, we show that the optimal
policy can be characterised by a series of rationing thresholds, a series of substitution thresholds
and a priority threshold, all of which depend on the system states. We further give conditions
under which the optimal policy can be simplified. Numerical experiments are conducted to
show the impact of the substitution of two items on the revenue, to compare the performance
of the optimal policy with those of the commonly used policies and to investigate the influence
of arrival rates on the optimal policy. Last, we extend the basic model to consider different
rental durations, ECCsâ acceptance behaviour and endogenous prices for WICs.British AcademyNational Natural Science Foundation of China/Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Joint Research SchemeNational Natural Science Foundation of China/Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Joint Research SchemeNational Natural Science Foundation of ChinaNational Natural Science Foundation of ChinaZhejiang Shuren University ResearchBeijing Logistics Informatics Research Bas
Dynamic Booking Control for Car Rental Revenue Management : A Decomposition Approach
This paper considers dynamic booking control for a single-station car rental revenue management problem. Different from conventional airline revenue management, car rental revenue management needs to take into account not only the existing bookings but also the lengths of the existing rentals and the capacity flexibility via fleet shuttling, which yields a high-dimensional system state space. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic booking control problem as a discrete-time stochastic dynamic program over an infinite horizon. Such a model is computationally intractable. We propose a decomposition approach and develop two heuristics. The first heuristic is an approximate dynamic program (ADP) which approximates the value function using the value functions of the decomposed problems. The second heuristic is constructed directly from the optimal booking limits computed from the decomposed problems, which is more scalable compared to the ADP heuristic. Our numerical study suggests that the performances of both heuristics are close to optimum and significantly outperform the commonly used probabilistic non-linear programming (PNLP) heuristic in most of the instances. The dominant performance of our second heuristic is evidenced in a case study using sample data from a major car rental company in the UK
Nonlinear pricing for stochastic container leasing system
With the substantial upsurge of container traffic, the container leasing company thrives on the financial benefits and operational flexibility of leasing containers requested by shippers. In practice, container lease pricing problem is different from the consumer product pricing in consideration of the fair value of container, limited customer types and monopolistic supply market. In view of the durability of container and the diversified lease time and quantity, the pricing is a challenging task for the leasing company. This paper examines the monopolistâs nonlinear pricing problems in static and dynamic envi- ronments. In particular, the leasing company designs and commits a menu of price and hire quantity/time pairs to maximize the expected profit and in turn customers choose hire quantities/time to maximize their surpluses according to their hire preferences. In a static environment, closed-form solutions are obtained for different groups of customers with multiple types subject to capacity constraint. In a dynamic environment, we address two customer types and derive closed-form solutions for the problem of customers with hire time preference. Further, we show that the effect of the capacity constraint increases with time of the planning horizon when customers have the same hire time preference; while in the case with different hire time preferences, the capacity constraint has opposite effects on the low and high type customers. Last, the case of customers with hire quantity preference is discussed. We focus on the lease with alternative given sets of hire time and use dynamic programming to derive the numerical optimal hire time sequence
A review of revenue management : recent generalizations and advances in industry applications
Originating from passenger air transport, revenue management has evolved into a general and indispensable methodological framework over the last decades, comprising techniques to manage demand actively and to further improve companiesâ profits in many different industries. This article is the second and final part of a paper series surveying the scientific developments and achievements in revenue management over the past 15 years. The first part focused on the general methodological advances regarding choice-based theory and methods of availability control over time. In this second part, we discuss some of the most important generalizations of the standard revenue management setting: product innovations (opaque products and flexible products), upgrading, overbooking, personalization, and risk-aversion. Furthermore, to demonstrate the broad use of revenue management, we survey important industry applications beyond passenger air transportation that have received scientific attention over the years, covering air cargo, hotel, car rental, attended home delivery, and manufacturing. We work out the specific revenue management-related challenges of each industry and portray the key contributions from the literature. We conclude the paper with some directions for future research
The Power of Static Pricing for Reusable Resources
We consider the problem of pricing a reusable resource service system.
Potential customers arrive according to a Poisson process and purchase the
service if their valuation exceeds the current price. If no units are
available, customers immediately leave without service. Serving a customer
corresponds to using one unit of the reusable resource, where the service time
has an exponential distribution. The objective is to maximize the steady-state
revenue rate. This system is equivalent to the classical Erlang loss model with
price-sensitive customers, which has applications in vehicle sharing, cloud
computing, and spare parts management.
Although an optimal pricing policy is dynamic, we provide two main results
that show a simple static policy is universally near-optimal for any service
rate, arrival rate, and number of units in the system. When there is one class
of customers who have a monotone hazard rate (MHR) valuation distribution, we
prove that a static pricing policy guarantees 90.4\% of the revenue from the
optimal dynamic policy. When there are multiple classes of customers that each
have their own regular valuation distribution and service rate, we prove that
static pricing guarantees 78.9\% of the revenue of the optimal dynamic policy.
In this case, the optimal pricing policy is exponentially large in the number
of classes while the static policy requires only one price per class. Moreover,
we prove that the optimal static policy can be easily computed, resulting in
the first polynomial time approximation algorithm for this problem
APPLICATIONS OF REVENUE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTHCARE
Most profit oriented organizations are constantly striving to improve their revenues while keeping costs under control, in a continuous effort to meet customersâ demand. After its proven success in the airline industry, the revenue management approach is implemented today in many industries and organizations that face the challenge of satisfying customersâ uncertain demand with a relatively fixed amount of resources (Talluri and Van Ryzin 2004). Revenue management has the potential to complement existing scheduling and pricing policies, and help organizations reach important improvements in profitability through a better management of capacity and demand. The work presented in this thesis investigates the use of revenue management techniques in the service sector, when demand for service arrives from several competing customer classes and the amount of resource required to provide service for each customer is stochastic. We look into efficiently allocating a limited resource (i.e., time) among requests for service when facing variable resource usage per request, by deciding on the amount of resource to be protected for each customer and surgery class. The capacity allocation policies we develop lead to maximizing the organizationâs expected revenue over the planning horizon, while making no assumption about the order of customersâ arrival. After the development of the theory in Chapter 3, we show how the mathematical model works by implementing it in the healthcare industry, more specifically in the operating room area, towards protecting time for elective procedures and patient classes. By doing this, we develop advance patient scheduling and capacity allocation policies and apply them to scheduling situations faced by operating rooms to determine optimal time allocations for various types of surgical procedures. The main contribution is the development of the methodology to handle random resource utilization in the context of revenue management, with focus in healthcare. We also develop a heuristics which could be used for larger size problems. We show how the optimal and heuristic-based solutions apply to real-life situations. Both the model and the heuristic find applications in healthcare where demand for service arrives randomly over time from various customer segments, and requires uncertain resource usage per request
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The Timing And Performance Of Initial Public Offerings : Insights From Securitized Real Estate New Issues
The thesis broadly attempts to address two issues. First, does the special pricing of securitised real estate firms provide insight into the initial returns, long-run performance and timing of IPOs? Second, is inter-temporal variation in IPO activity the result of windows of opportunity that depend on business conditions?
Securitised real estate IPOs are useful in understanding IPO behaviour because of the unique asset value methodology used for pricing their shares. Empirical evidence in the thesis confirms that Property Investment IPOs have more certain prices and lower initial returns than Property Development IPOs. Property Investment IPOs are found to be efficiently priced in the secondary market. These results are supportive of underpricing-efficient markets explanations of initial returns. In contrast to findings for operating firms, Property Investment company equity issuers do not underperform non-issuers. The results for Property Investment and Property Development equity issuers are consistent with pricing uncertainty and cognitive bias adversely affecting aftermarket performance. The similar long-run performance of IPOs and rights issues documented in the thesis rejects the contention that firms time issues to take advantage of new shareholders. Regression analysis of property stocks confirms that neither book-market nor size characteristics are associated with new issue effects in the UK property share market. There appears to be a real estate pricing characteristic that affects both the initial and long-run performance of securitised real estate IPOs.
The thesis proposes the windows of opportunity theory to explain variations in issue activity. Firms go public when improved business conditions result in better business opportunities, weaker adverse selection costs, and lower direct issue costs. The sample of 1261 firms used to test the theory provides considerable empirical evidence of the characteristics of the UK IPO market. Using duration (the spell between IPO transactions) for the first time in the IPO literature, a positive relationship between IPO activity and both business and stockmarket conditions is confirmed. Time series regressions on the real amount raised in IPOs confirms that more money is raised when the business conditions are near a peak and when the stockmarket is relatively high. Poisson regression results suggest that IPO volume is linked to business conditions. Property Investment and Property Development IPO activity is found to increase following an increase in real estate market conditions; suggesting that variations in industry business conditions explain variations in industry IPO activity. Firms that went public in hot issue markets achieve cost savings over cold issue market firms. Firms undertaking IPOs in hot issue markets typically pay only 65% of the costs incurred by cold market issuers. Ffot issue market IPOs on average have implied costs from initial returns which are 60% less than cold issue market IPOs. Time series regression results indicate that high initial returns deter firms from going public and increased information flow attracts firms to the market. The results suggest that business opportunities, adverse selection costs and direct issue Costs determine IPO activity
International benchmarking of Australian telecommunications services
The study compares the performance of the Australian telecommunications services industry with those in other countries. Related papers submitted to this study by NECG Ltd. and Telecom New Zealand have been released with the report.international benchmarking - telecommunications - Telstra - carriers - service providers - social policy - retail price regulation - Universal Service Obligation - competition - regulation - access - number portability - accounting separation - anti-competitive behaviour - Public Switched Telephone Network - ISDN - mobile - residential price - business price - phone - SMEs - quality of service - performance indicators - productivity
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