Three Essays on Dynamic Pricing and Resource Allocation
This thesis consists of three essays that focus on different aspects of pricing and resource allocation. We use techniques from supply chain and revenue management, scenario-based robust optimization and game theory to study the behavior of firms in different competitive and non-competitive settings. We develop dynamic programming models that account for pricing and resource allocation decisions of firms in such settings. In Chapter 2, we focus on the resource allocation problem of a service firm, particularly a health-care facility. We formulate a general model that is applicable to various resource allocation problems of a hospital. To this end, we consider a system with multiple customer classes that display different reactions to delays in service. By adopting a dynamic-programming approach, we show that the optimal policy is not simple but exhibits desirable monotonicity properties. Furthermore, we propose a simple threshold heuristic policy that performs well in our experiments. In Chapter 3, we study a dynamic pricing problem for a monopolist seller that operates in a setting where buyers have market power, and where each potential sale takes the form of a bilateral negotiation. We review the dynamic programming formulation of the negotiation problem, and propose a simple and tractable deterministic "fluid" analogue for this problem. The main emphasis of the chapter is in expanding the formulation to the dynamic setting where both the buyer and seller have limited prior information on their counterparty valuation and their negotiation skill. In Chapter 4, we consider the revenue maximization problem of a seller who operates in a market where there are two types of customers; namely the "investors" and "regular-buyers". In a two-period setting, we model and solve the pricing game between the seller and the investors in the latter period, and based on the solution of this game, we analyze the revenue maximization problem of the seller in the former period. Moreover, we study the effects on the total system profits when the seller and the investors cooperate through a contracting mechanism rather than competing with each other; and explore the contracting opportunities that lead to higher profits for both agents.
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