講座題目：Opaque Selling and Last-Minute Selling: Revenue Management in Vertically Differentiated Markets

報告人：Dr. Hang Ren, Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Operations Management, School of Business, George Mason University

講座時(shí)間：2019年7月3日星期三上午：10:00-11:30

講座地點(diǎn)：bwin必贏(yíng)唯一官網(wǎng)3樓313教室

講座內容：Opaque selling has been applied to dispose of excess inventory in many industries. The existing literature has analyzed its performance in comparison to the classic last-minute selling strategy (i.e., selling the leftover products separately) in horizontally differentiated markets. However, it remains unclear how opaque selling performs in vertically differentiated markets. To address this question, we consider a dynamic pricing model in which a firm sells vertically differentiated products across two periods to strategic consumers. We characterize the firm's optimal selling strategy and find that opaque selling may outperform last-minute selling because it increases the regular price by reducing the effective quality of products offered to the high-valuation consumers in the sales season. Its disadvantage, however, lies in the inflexibility of segmenting heterogeneous-valuation consumers during sales. Both the advantage and the disadvantage are radically different from their counterparts in horizontally differentiated markets, and this contrast generates opposite policy recommendations across the two settings. Specifically, under vertical differentiation, the firm may switch from opaque selling to last-minute selling as consumers become more differentiated or the probability of a low demand increases. However, it always switches in the opposite direction under horizontal differentiation.

學(xué)者介紹：Hang Ren博士畢業(yè)于英國倫敦大學(xué)學(xué)院（University College London），現為喬治梅森大學(xué)（George Mason University）助理教授。主要研究方向為運營(yíng)管理中的消費者行為研究、服務(wù)運營(yíng)、零售運營(yíng)、健康運營(yíng)、可持續運營(yíng)管理以及運營(yíng)&營(yíng)銷(xiāo)交互。他的研究成果在Production & Operations Management, Naval Research Logistics, Computers & Operations Research等高水平期刊上發(fā)表。