The Benefits of Advance Booking Discount Programs: Model and Analysis

Consider a retailer who sells perishable seasonal products with uncertain demand. Due to the short sales season and long replenishment lead times associated with such products, the retailer is unable to update demand forecasts by using actual sales data generated from the early part of the season and to respond by replenishing stocks during the season. To overcome this limitation, we examine the case in which the retailer develops a program called the "advance booking discount" (ABD) program that entices customers to commit to their orders at a discount price prior to the selling season. The time between placement and fulfillment of these precommitted orders provides an opportunity for the retailer to update demand forecasts by utilizing information generated from the precommitted orders and to respond by placing a cost-effective order at the beginning of the selling season. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of the ABD program and characterize the optimal discount price that maximizes the retailer's expected profit.retailing, marketing/manufacturing interfaces, pricing

Mass Customization vs. Mass Production: Variety and Price Competition

We study competition between two multiproduct firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology and thus can offer any variety within a product space, represented by Hotelling's linear city. The mass producer (MP) has a more focused production technology and therefore offers a finite set of products in the same space. The MP can invest in more flexible technology, which reduces its cost of variety and hence allows it to offer a larger set of products; in the extreme, the MP can emulate the MC's technology and offer infinite variety. The firms simultaneously decide whether to enter the market, and the MP chooses its degree of product-mix flexibility on entry. Next, the MP designs its product line--i.e., the number and position of its products--the MC's perfectly flexible technology makes this unnecessary. Finally, both firms simultaneously set prices. We analyze the subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium in this three-stage game, allowing firm-specific fixed and variable costs that together characterize their production technology. We find that an MP facing competition from an MC offers lower product variety than an MP monopolist to reduce the intensity of price competition. We also find that the MP can survive this competition, even if it has higher fixed cost of production technology, higher marginal cost of production, or both.product variety management, mass customization, operations-marketing interface, discrete consumer choice, competitive product strategy, pricing