Competitive multi-period pricing for perishable products

Pricing of a perishable product over a multi-period time horizon is a challenging problem under an oligopolistic market framework. We propose and study a model for multi-period pricing in an oligopolistic market for a single perishable product. Each participating seller in the market has a fixed inventory of the product at the beginning of the time horizon and additional production is not an available option. Any unsold inventory at the end of the horizon is worthless. The sellers do not have the option of periodically reviewing and replenishing their inventory. Such a model is appropriate for modelling competition in situations where inventory replenishment decisions are made over a longer time horizon and can be considered exogenous to the pricing decision process. This kind of a setup can be used to model pricing of air fares, hotel reservations, bandwidth in communication networks, etc. In this thesis, we study two issues related to multi-period pricing of a perishable product. First we study the competitive aspect of the problem. Second we study the setup where the demand function for each seller has some associated uncertainty. We assume that the sellers would like to adopt a policy that is robust to adverse uncertain circumstances. We discuss the challenges associated with the analysis for this model.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Sood, Anshul, 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Georgia Perakis.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17724

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17724