optimal dynamic pricing of inventories with stochastic demand over finite horizons in many industries managers face the problem of selling a given stock of items by a deadline we investigate the problem of dynamically pricing such inventories when demand is price sensitive and stochastic and the firm s objective is to maximize expected revenues examples that fit this framework include retailers selling fashion and seasonal goods and the travel and leisure industry which markets space such as seats on airline flights cabins on vacation cruises and rooms in hotels that become worthless if not sold by a specific time we formulate this problem using intensity control and obtain structural monotonicity results for the optimal intensity resp price as a function of the stock level and the length of the horizon for a particular exponential family of demand functions we find the optimal pricing policy in closed form for general demand functions we find an upper bound on the expected revenue based on analyzing the deterministic version of the problem and use this bound to prove that simple fixed price policies are asymptotically optimal as the volume of expected sales tends to infinity finally we extend our results to the case where demand is compound poisson only a finite number of prices is allowed the demand rate is time varying holding costs are incurred and cash flows are discounted the initial stock is a decision variable and reordering overbooking and random cancellations are allowed

an examination of ethical influences on the work of tax practitioners as a contribution to the continuing debate about tax practitioner ethics this paper explores the main streams of western ethical thought that are relevant to tax practitioners work most typically deontology and consequentialism although virtue ethics and distributive justice are also considered it then goes on to consider the impact of such ethical influences on the professional ethical codes of conduct that govern tax practitioners work with specific reference to the uk and ireland and attempts to unravel the complex work and ethical environment of the practice of tax in terms of tax compliance and tax avoidance the paper then examines the prior studies on tax practitioners and ethics and the type of dilemmas that practitioners face in the context of their work the paper proceeds to examine empirically the extent to which tax practitioners take a consequentialist versus a deontological approach in their reasoning about moral dilemmas this is carried out by an innovative use of the defining issues test

dynamic pricing of perishable assets under competition we study dynamic price competition in an oligopolistic market with a mix of substitutable and complementary perishable assets each firm has a fixed initial stock of items and competes in setting prices to sell them over a finite sales horizon customers sequentially arrive at the market make a purchase choice and then leave immediately with some likelihood of no purchase the purchase likelihood depends on the time of purchase product attributes and current prices the demand structure includes time variant linear and multinomial logit demand models as special cases assuming deterministic customer arrival rates we show that any equilibrium strategy has a simple structure involving a finite set of shadow prices measuring capacity externalities that firms exert on each other equilibrium prices can be solved from a one shot price competition game under the current time demand structure taking into account capacity externalities through the time invariant shadow prices the former reflects the transient demand side at every moment and the latter captures the aggregate supply constraints over the sales horizon this simple structure sheds light on dynamic revenue management problems under competition which helps capture the essence of the problems under demand uncertainty we show that the equilibrium solutions from the deterministic game provide precommitted and contingent heuristic policies that are asymptotic equilibria for its stochastic counterpart when demand and supply are sufficiently large this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

optimal dynamic pricing for perishable assets with nonhomogeneous demand we consider a dynamic pricing model for selling a given stock of a perishable product over a finite time horizon customers whose reservation price distribution changes over time arrive according to a nonhomogeneous poisson process we show that at any given time the optimal price decreases with inventory we also identify a sufficient condition under which the optimal price decreases over time for a given inventory level this sufficient condition requires that the willingness of a customer to pay a premium for the product does not increase over time in addition to shedding managerial insight these structural properties enable efficient computation of the optimal policy numerical studies are conducted to show the revenue impact of dynamic price policies price changes are set to compensate for statistical fluctuations of demand and to respond to shifts of the reservation price for the former our examples show that using optimal dynamic optimal policies achieves 2 4 7 3 revenue improvement over the optimal single price policy for the latter the revenue increase can be as high as 100 these results explain why yield management has become so essential to fashion retailing and travel service industries

will dynamic pricing outperform theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from o2o on demand food service market abstract this study attempts to identify the pricing strategy of three most commonly used on demand food service platforms in china based on detailed information of more than 240 000 orders and further evaluates the impact of pricing strategy on platform performance we find that some platforms adopt dynamic pricing strategies while other platforms adopt static pricing strategies considering the unique structure of the o2o on demand food service market in china we develop a dyadic two sided market theory and demonstrate that compared with static pricing strategies dynamic pricing strategies perform better consistent with our theory our empirical analysis also suggests that platforms adopting dynamic pricing strategies have a significantly higher level of demand compared with platforms adopting static strategies in addition our results indicate the importance of delivery speed red envelopes and ratings in promoting demand

pricing and capacity rationing for rentals with uncertain durations we consider a rental firm with two types of customers contract customers pay fixed prenegotiated rental fees and expect a high quality of service walk in customers have no contractual relations with the firm and are shopping for price given multiple contract and walk in classes the rental firm has to decide when to offer service to contract customers and what fees to charge walk in customers for service we formulate this rental management problem as a problem in stochastic control and characterize optimal policies for managing contract and walk in customers we also consider static myopic controls that are simpler to implement and we analytically establish conditions under which these policies perform optimally complementary numerical tests provide a sense of the range of systems for which myopic policies are effective

explaining fashion cycles imitators chasing innovators in product space abstract this paper considers the problem of a fashion trend setter confronting an imitator who can produce the same product at lower cost a one dimensional product space is considered which is an abstraction of the key attribute of some consumer good three broad strategies can be optimal for the fashion leader 1 never innovate which milk profits from the initially advantageous position but ultimately concede the market without a fight 2 innovate once but only once which just temporarily defers conceding the market 3 cycle infinitely around product space never letting the imitator catch up and capture the market sometimes the cycles start immediately sometimes the innovator should wait for a time before beginning the cycles the optimal solution exhibits strong state dependency with so called skiba curves separating regions in state space where various of these strategies are optimal there are even instances of intersecting skiba curves in most cases analytical expressions can be stated that characterize these skiba curves

a survey on risk averse and robust revenue management abstract many industries use revenue management to balance uncertain stochastic demand and inflexible capacity popular examples include airlines hotels car rentals retailing and manufacturing the classical revenue management approaches considered in theory and practice are based on two assumptions first demand as the only uncertain variable follows a known distribution and second risk neutrality justifies the maximization of expected revenue recently two related streams of literature emerged that do not need these assumptions research on risk averse revenue management acknowledges that in practice many decision makers are risk averse research on robust revenue management focuses worst case scenarios without a known demand distribution which is especially relevant for new and extremely unstable businesses this paper motivates the consideration of risk averse and robust revenue management we briefly introduce revenue managements two main methods capacity control and dynamic pricing in the classical risk neutral setting then we provide an exhaustive review of the literature on risk averse and robust capacity control and dynamic pricing in doing so the relevant decision criteria are briefly introduced finally possible avenues for future research are outlined

price trends and dynamic pricing in perishable product market consisting of superior and inferior firms abstract we consider the problem of a firm that sells perishable products with a dynamic pricing scheme in the presence of a firm offering a superior product we provide a probabilistic characterization of the optimal price process under the existence of such a firm for an aggregate demand model and for a multinomial logit demand model our results demonstrate that if the seller takes the price of the other firm into account in their optimal policy then the optimal price process tends to increase over time before the inventory level falls to one after which it decreases otherwise the price process decreases and then increases this path is called a j shaped curve before the inventory level falls to one if the price of the other firm is relatively low and the customer s valuation remains unchanged over time early in the sales period we also demonstrate numerically that when the firm uses a monopolistic policy and the difference in service quality between the two firms is large the switching time between the downward and upward trends takes place in the early stage of the sales period and in particular this j shaped phenomenon is strongly observed

bundle pricing of inventories with stochastic demand we consider a retailer selling a fixed inventory of two perishable products over a finite horizon assuming poisson arrivals and a bivariate reservation price distribution we determine the optimal product and bundle prices that maximize the expected revenue our results indicate that the performances of mixed bundling pure bundling and unbundled sales strategies heavily depend on the parameters of the demand process and the initial inventory levels bundling appears to be most effective with negatively correlated reservation prices and high starting inventory levels when the starting inventory levels are equal and in excess of average demand most of the benefits of bundling can be achieved through pure bundling however the mixed bundling strategy dominates the other two when the starting inventory levels are not equal we also observe that an incorrect modeling of the reservation prices may lead to significant losses the model is extended to allow for price changes during the selling horizon it is shown that offering price bundles mid season may be more effective than changing individual product prices

simulation study of the price differentiation effect in a stochastic deteriorating inventory with heterogeneous consumers freshness sensitivity a fixed price policy regardless of expiration date may result in unsold inventory and sales loss price reduction over time as the expiration date approaches motivates customers to purchase all items including the ones that are left with only a short interval until their expiration we conduct a discrete event simulation that captures the main characteristics of this phenomenon results show that a moderate differentiation of price increases profits by 6 a larger differentiation reduces profits profits are the highest for freshness oriented customers a fixed price policy is preferred in an environment of large variance and expected near term expirations

dynamic pricing of inventory capacity with infrequent price changes we consider a problem of dynamically pricing a single product sold by a monopolist over a short time period if demand characteristics change throughout the period it becomes attractive for the company to adjust price continuously to respond to such changes i e price discriminate intertemporally however in practice there is typically a limit on the number of times the price can be adjusted due to the high costs associated with frequent price changes if that is the case instead of a continuous pricing rule the company might want to establish a piece wise constant pricing policy in order to limit the number of price adjustments such a pricing policy which involves optimal choice of prices and timing of price changes is the focus of this paper we analyze the pricing problem with a limited number of price changes in a dynamic deterministic environment in which demand depends on the current price and time and there is a capacity inventory constraint that may be set optimally ahead of the selling season the arrival rate can evolve in time arbitrarily allowing us to model situations in which prices decrease increase or neither we consider several plausible scenarios where pricing and or timing of price changes are endogenized various notions of complementarity single crossing property supermodularity and total positivity are explored to derive structural results conditions sufficient for the uniqueness of the solution and the monotonicity of prices throughout the sales period furthermore we characterize the impact of the capacity constraint on the optimal prices and the timing of price changes and provide several other comparative statics results additional insights are obtained directly from the solutions of various special cases

optimal dynamic auctions for revenue management we analyze a dynamic auction in which a seller withc units to sell faces a sequence of buyers separated intot time periods each group of buyers has independent private values for a single unit buyers compete directly against each other within a period as in a traditional auction and indirectly with buyers in other periods through the opportunity cost of capacity assessed by the seller the number of buyers in each period as well as the individual buyers valuations are random the model is a variation of the traditional single leg multiperiod revenue management problem in which consumers act strategically and bid for units of a fixed capacity over time for this setting we prove that dynamic variants of the first price and second price auction mechanisms maximize the seller s expected revenue we also show explicitly how to compute and implement these optimal auctions the optimal auctions are then compared to a traditional revenue management mechanism in which list prices are used in each period together with capacity controls and to a simple auction heuristic that consists of allocating units to each period and running a sequence of standard multiunit auctions with fixed reserve prices in each period the traditional revenue management mechanism is proven to be optimal in the limiting cases when there is at most one buyer per period when capacity is not constraining and asymptotically when the number of buyers and the capacity increases the optimal auction significantly outperforms both suboptimal mechanisms when there are a moderate number of periods capacity is constrained and the total volume of sales is not too large the benefit also increases when variability in the dispersion in buyers valuations or in the number of buyers per period increases

joint inventory allocation and pricing decisions for perishable products abstract we jointly determine the price and the inventory allocation for a perishable product with a predetermined lifetime we assume that the price of the product increases as the time when it perishes approaches as in the airline industry demand for the product is price sensitive to maximize the expected revenue we developed a discrete time dynamic programming model to obtain the optimal prices and the optimal inventory allocations for the product with a two period lifetime we then proposed three heuristics when the lifetime is longer than two periods the computational results showed that the expected revenues from the proposed heuristics were very close to that of the optimal solution we extended these results to i the case where the price for the product consistently decreases and ii the case where the price for the product first increases and later decreases

dynamic pricing behavior in perishable goods markets evidence from secondary markets for major league baseball tickets sellers of perishable goods increasingly use dynamic pricing strategies as technology makes it easier to change prices and track inventory this paper tests how accurately theoretical models of dynamic pricing describe sellers behavior in secondary markets for event tickets a classic example of a perishable good it shows that the simplest dynamic pricing models describe very accurately both the pricing problem faced by sellers and how they behave explaining why sellers cut prices dramatically by 40 percent or more as an event approaches the estimates also imply that dynamic pricing is valuable raising the average seller s expected payoff by around 16 percent

has ryanair s pricing strategy changed over time an empirical analysis of its 2006 2007 flights abstract this paper analyzes the question of whether ryanair s pricing strategies have changed over time we create a panel dataset of fares for all of ryanair s european flights over a two year period from 1 january 2006 to 31 december 2007 we calculate the average fare over a 90 day period prior to departure and the intensity of dynamic pricing for each flight in the panel in particular analysing the changes in these variables observed between pairs of equivalent flights our results show that overall both average fares and the intensity of dynamic pricing decreased in 2007 more than one third of flights saw a price reduction of more than 10 now that it has become the dominant low cost carrier in europe ryanair appears to be softening its dynamic pricing activities on existing routes typically employed to stimulate additional touristic demand thus booking in advance becomes relatively more expensive

integration of pricing and capacity allocation for perishable products abstract for years pricing and capacity allocation decisions in most revenue management models have been carried out independently this article presents a comprehensive model to integrate these two decisions for perishable products we assume that the supplier sells the same products to different micro markets at distinct prices throughout the sales season the supplier faces decisions as to which micro markets or customer classes should be served and at what prices we show that i at any time a customer class is active being served if and only if the price offered is over a threshold level but the optimal price may not be the highest one of the supplier s choice ii when the price decision is made in conjunction with inventory it is similar to the procedure shown in pure pricing models i e the optimal price comes from a subset of prices that forms a maximum increasing concave envelope iii because of dynamic changes in the optimal prices the nested price structure does not necessarily hold in general and needs to be redefined and iv the optimal pricing and capacity control policy is based on a sequence of threshold points that incorporate inventory price and demand intensity numerical examples are provided

analytical solutions to the dynamic pricing problem for time normalized revenue abstract in this work we consider dynamic pricing for the case of continuous replenishment an essential ingredient in such a formulation is the use of time normalized revenue or profit function in other words revenue or profit per unit time this provides the incentive to sell many items in the shortest time and of course at a high price moreover for most firms what matters most is how much revenue or profit is achieved in a certain time frame for example per year this changes the problem qualitatively and methodologically we develop a new dynamic pricing model for this formulation we derive an analytical solution to the pricing problem in the form of a simple to solve ordinary differential equation ode equation the trajectory of this ode gives the optimal pricing curve unlike many of the models existing in the literature that rely on computationally demanding dynamic programming type solutions our model is relatively simple to solve also we apply the derived equation to two commonly used price demand functions the exponential and the power functions and derive closed form pricing curves for these functions

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

price discrimination through refund contracts in airlines this paper shows how an airline monopoly uses refundable and non refundable tickets to screen consumers who are uncertain about their travel our theoretical model predicts that the difference between these two fares diminishes as individual demand uncertainty is resolved using an original data set from u s airline markets we find strong evidence supporting our model price discrimination opportunities through refund contracts decline as the departure date nears and individuals learn about their demand

dynamic pricing through discounts for optimizing multiple class demand fulfillment in a multiple customer class model of demand fulfillment for a single item we consider the use of dynamic price discounts to encourage backlogging of demand for customer classes denied immediate service customers are assumed to arrive over several stages in a period and customer classes are distinguished by their contractual price and sensitivity to discounts through dynamic programming we determine the optimal discounts to offer assuming a linear model for the sensitivity of customers to such inducements we show that customers are served in class order and allocation of inventory to demand is determined by considering the current number of customers backlogged as well as the current inventory position through comparison to a naive supplier allocating inventory first come first served with no discounting we show that profits are primarily influenced by the allocation of capacity and the use of price discounts primarily benefits the second class customers overall fill rate heuristics for implementation of the solution in real time settings are given

simple policies for dynamic pricing with imperfect forecasts we consider the classical single product dynamic pricing problem allowing the scale of demand intensity to be modulated by an exogenous market size stochastic process this is a natural model of dynamically changing market conditions we show that for a broad family of gaussian market size processes simple dynamic pricing rules that are essentially agnostic to the specification of this market size process perform provably well the pricing policies we develop are shown to compensate for forecast imperfections or a lack of forecast information altogether by frequent reoptimization and reestimation of the instantaneous market size

how risky is r and d a financial approach in order to understand the relationship between market structure and the risk of innovation this paper proposes a synthesis between the capital asset pricing model and simple models of industrial organization the theoretical section of the paper discusses the real determinants of r d riskiness finding that several unique features of r d assets may influence their systematic risk including their strategic nature and random arrival as well as the firm s industry context the empirical results suggest that there is a considerable systematic risk premium associated with r d that can be partially offset by firm size and market concentration copyright 1990 by mit press

a competitive dynamic pricing model when demand is interdependent over time abstract in this study we contribute to the dynamic pricing literature by developing a finite horizon model for two firms offering substitutable and nonperishable products with different quality levels customers can purchase and store the products even if they do not need them at the time in order to use them in future the stockpile of the products generated by customers affects the demand in future periods therefore the demand for each product not only is a function of prices and quality levels but also of the products stockpile levels in addition the stockpile levels change the customers consumption behavior more product in a stockpile leads to more consumption therefore we address not only the price and demand relationship but also the stockpiling and consumption relationship in a competitive environment the decision variable of each firm at the beginning of each period is its unit sale price we use a deterministic dynamic program to calculate the equilibrium prices at the beginning of each period by assuming that the market stockpile is public information we show the existence of a unique nash equilibrium we next consider the case when the firms do not know the market stockpile we then develop appropriate heuristics to calculate the optimal prices in each case a numerical study is also provided to calculate the price levels in different scenarios and compare their performances

dynamic pricing advance sales and aggregate demand learning in airlines this paper uses a unique u s airlines panel data set to empirically study the dynamic pricing of inventories with uncertain demand over a finite horizon i estimate a dynamic pricing equation and a dynamic demand equation that jointly characterize the adjustment process between prices and sales as the flight date nears i find that the price increases as the inventory decreases and decreases as there is less time to sell consistent with aggregate demand learning and price adjustment demand shocks have a positive and much larger effect on prices than the positive effect of anticipated sales

transformation of optimization problems in revenue management queueing system and supply chain management abstract for revenue optimization problems in the literature on revenue management supply chain management and queueing systems some assumptions such as concavity of revenue functions or increasing generalized failure rate are often needed to ensure the problems to be analytically tractable we show that these assumptions are not necessary for this we present and study a parametric revenue maximization problem to unify some problems in the literature without the usual assumptions we transform the problem into an equivalent one where the revenue function is increasing continuous and concave we then apply the transformation method to a continuous time revenue management problem and conclude that the monotone results are robust to demand function and allowable price set also we apply the transformation method to study a parametric cost minimization problem we further apply our method to two optimal control problems in queueing systems and an inventory control problem in a supply chain with price only contract

honesty and evasion in the tax compliance game conventional models of tax compliance emphasize that taxpayers make strategic tax reports underreporting income to the extent that this behavior is functionally rewarded in contrast to this view considerable empirical evidence suggests that many taxpayers are inherently honest reporting truthfully regardless of the incentive to cheat in this article we build a game theoretic model of tax compliance that includes both honest and potentially dishonest taxpayers we show that including honest taxpayers significantly alters the model leading to much improved empirical predictions and somewhat different and novel policy implications

mathematical programming for network revenue management revisited mathematical programming models for airline seat inventory control provide booking limits and bid prices for all itineraries and fare classes e l williamson airline network seat inventory control methodologies and revenue impacts ph d thesis massachusetts institute of technology cambridge ma 1992 finds that simple deterministic approximation methods based on average demand often outperform more advanced probabilistic heuristics we argue that this phenomenon is due to a booking process that includes nesting of the fare classes which is ignored in the modeling phase the differences in the performance between these approximations are studied using a stochastic programming model that includes the deterministic model as a special case our study carefully examines the trade off between computation time and the aggregation level of demand uncertainty with examples of a multi leg flight and a single hub network

the relationship between federal contract r d and company r d according to recent estimates federal budget outlays for research and development rd this component will rise 28 percent and absorb 70 percent of all federal r d spending in 1984 compared to under 50 percent in 1980 since work corresponding to about one half of the dollar value of the federal r d program is generally performed by private industrial firms under contract with federal agencies the rapid increase in federal r d outlays will presumably be reflected in a similar increase in the value of commitments by industrial firms to perform government r d one of the most important economic questions posed by the large prospective increase in resources allocated to federal contract r d concerns its consequences for the economy s rate of technical progress of productivity growth in the next section i argue that the ultimate impact on productivity depends on how company decisions to finance r d are affected by the availability of federal contract r d funds i then provide a brief review and critique of previous studies of the relationship between companyand federalfinanced r d performed in industry and present new estimates which differ from existing ones with respect to both methodology and implications these estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that increases in federal r d activity tend to be associated with significant reductions in companyfinanced r d a number of studies have attempted to determine the ceteris paribus effects of company and federal r d on the rate of productivity growth p by estimating variants of the equation

coordinating clearance markdown sales of seasonal products in retail chains in this paper we propose a methodology to set prices of perishable items in the context of a retail chain with coordinated prices among its stores and compare its performance with actual practice in a real case study we formulate a stochastic dynamic programming problem and develop heuristic solutions that approximate optimal solutions satisfactorily to compare this methodology with current practices in the industry we conducted two sets of experiments using the expertise of a product manager of a large retail company in chile in the first case we contrast the performance of the proposed methodology with the revenues obtained during the 1995 autumn winter season in the second case we compare it with the performance of the experienced product manager in a simulation game setting in both cases our methodology provides significantly better results than those obtained by current practices

dynamic capacity management with uncertain demand and dynamic price inspired from practices of chinese real estate firms we study dynamic capacity management problems for a firm that sells homogeneous goods over a finite or infinite selling horizon provided that demand is uncertain retail price is exogenous but changes according to an auto regressive process and there is holding cost for remaining inventory in each period the capacity problems facing the firm include to determine an initial stock at the beginning of the selling season and to allocate the remaining quantity for the current and future sale in each period to maximize the firm s total expected discounted profit by using markov decision processes we show the optimality of a so called save up to level policy i e it is optimal to allocate as much as the save up to level to future periods if possible in each period and the existence of the optimal initial stock moreover we characterize monotone properties of the optimal save up to level and the optimal initial stock numerical analysis shows that compared to the policy with zero save up to level i e always allocating all the remaining inventory to the current period the advantage of the policy proposed in the present paper is significant when price rising trend is large holding cost is low initial price is high or demand variation is either high or low

optimal dynamic pricing of inventories with stochastic demand and discounted criterion abstract we consider a continuous time dynamic pricing problem for selling a given number of items over a finite or infinite time horizon the demand is price sensitive and follows a non homogeneous poisson process we formulate this problem as to maximize the expected discounted revenue and obtain the structural properties of the optimal revenue function and optimal price policy by the hamilton jacobi bellman hjb equation moreover we study the impact of the discount rate on the optimal revenue function and the optimal price further we extend the problem to the case with discounting and time varying demand the infinite time horizon problem numerical examples are used to illustrate our analytical results

systematic peak load pricing congestion premia and demand diverting empirical evidence abstract this paper finds empirical support to systematic peak load pricing in airlines higher fares in ex ante known congested periods it estimates a congestion premia and supports the main empirical prediction in gale and holmes gale i holmes t 1993 advance purchase discounts and monopoly allocation of capacity american economic review 83 135 146 less discount seats on peak flights

a multidimensional analysis of tax practitioners ethical judgments this study investigates professional tax practitioners ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in cases involving client pressure to adopt aggressive reporting positions an issue that has been identified as the most difficult ethical moral problem facing public accounting practitioners the multidimensional ethics scale mes was used to measure the extent to which a hypothetical behavior was consistent with five ethical philosophies moral equity contractualism utilitarianism relativism and egoism responses from a sample of 67 tax professionals supported the existence of all dimensions of the mes other than egoism regressions of ethical judgments and behavioral intentions on the mes dimensions indicate that ethical decision making is most heavily influenced by the moral equity dimension followed by the contractualism dimension in contrast the utilitarianism and relativism dimensions were only related to ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in isolated instances

discounting and dynamic shelf life to reduce fresh food waste at retailers approximately 89 million of tonnes of food is wasted every year in the eu along the whole food supply chain the reasons for food waste by retailers include inappropriate quality control overstocking and inaccurate forecasting this study shows that food wasted by retailers can be reduced by discounting old products or by applying a dynamically adjustable expiration date in other words dynamic shelf life dsl we developed a simulation based optimization model to optimize the replenishment and discounting policy of a retailer who sells meat products dsl outperforms a fixed shelf life fsl in terms of profit waste shortages and food safety furthermore replenishment quantities can be higher the benefits of dsl are greater when demand is low or when the shelf life of products is short discounting is a successful strategy to reduce food waste for both fsl and dsl dsl without discounting is more effective than fsl with discounting combining dsl and discounting allows for a further reduction of food waste

federal funding and the level of private expenditure on basic research economists have long been interested in questions concerning the role of government in stimulating private sector innovation in the late 1950s blank and stigler 2 asked in particular whether government funded industrial research and development r d activity was likely to stimulate or substitute for private sector expenditure on r d a number of studies have since addressed this issue and most conclude in favor of the existence of a positive relationship between federal r d expenditures and the level of private r d investment leyden and link 8 have provided a theoretical rationale for this observed complementarity they suggest that federallyfunded industrial r d activity may generate knowledge spillovers and other infratechnology that may raise the productivity of inputs into private r d r d is a heterogeneous activity and a question which has received relatively little attention in the literature is the extent to which the apparent complementarity between federal and private industrial r d spending holds for the different components of firms r d budgets cross section evidence on this issue produced by link 13 suggests that

periodic pricing of seasonal products in retailing this paper studies intertemporal pricing policies when selling seasonal products in retail stores we first present a continuous time model where a seller faces a stochastic arrival of customers with different valuations of the product for this model we characterize the optimal pricing policies as functions of time and inventory we use this model as a benchmark against which we compare more realistic models that consider periodic pricing reviews we show that the structure of the optimal pricing policies in this case is consistent with the procedures observed in practice retail stores successively discount the product during the season and promote a liquidation sale at the end of the planning horizon we also show that the loss experienced when implementing periodic pricing reviews instead of continuous policies is small when the appropriate number of reviews is chosen several interesting economic insights emerge from our analysis for example uncertainty in the demand for new products leads to higher prices larger discounts and more unsold inventory finally we study the effect of announced discount policies on prices and profits we show that stores that have adopted this type of strategy usually set prices such that with high probability the merchandise is sold during the first periods and the largest discounts rarely take place

dynamic pricing in the presence of inventory considerations research overview current practices and future directions the benefits of dynamic pricing methods have long been known in industries such as airlines hotels and electric utilities where the capacity is fixed in the short term and perishable in recent years there has been an increasing adoption of dynamic pricing policies in retail and other industries where the sellers have the ability to store inventory three factors contributed to this phenomenon 1 the increased availability of demand data 2 the ease of changing prices due to new technologies and 3 the availability of decision support tools for analyzing demand data and for dynamic pricing this paper constitutes a review of the literature and current practices in dynamic pricing given its applicability in most markets and its increasing adoption in practice our focus is on dynamic intertemporal pricing in the presence of inventory considerations

a pricing model for clearing end of season retail inventory the problem of setting prices for clearing retail inventories of fashion goods is a difficult task that is further exacerbated by the fact that markdowns enacted near the end of the selling season have a smaller impact on demand in this article we present discrete time models for setting clearance prices in such an environment when demand is deterministic we compute optimal prices and show that decreasing reservation prices lead to declining optimal prices when demand is stochastic and arbitrarily correlated across planning periods we obtain bounds on the optimal expected revenue and on optimal prices we also develop a heuristic procedure for finding near optimal prices and test its accuracy through numerical experiments these experiments reveal new insights for practitioners for example the penalty for choosing clearance price once and keeping it unchanged for the remainder of the selling season is found to be small when either the mean reservation prices do not change appreciably over time or when they drop sharply after the first period

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

why are governmental r d and private r d complements it is well known that government r d and private r d have a complementary relationship however no previous study has provided an explanation for why that complementary relationship exists this paper argues that infratechnology is the critical link between governmental and private r d and that the observed complementarity is the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding infratechnology and knowledge sharing a theoritical framework based on this argument is developed and examined empirically for supporting evidence evidence of technical complementary is found as well as evidence that governmental r d stimulates the sharing of knowledge

public r d policies and cost behavior of the us manufacturing industries abstract this paper estimates and evaluates the contribution of r d tax incentives and publicly financed r d investment policies in promoting the growth of output and privately funded r d investment in us manufacturing industries publicly financed r d induced cost savings but crowds out privately financed r d investment while the incremental r d tax credit and immediate deductibility provision of r d expenditures have a significant impact on privately financed r d investment the optimal mix of both instruments is an important element for sustaining a balanced growth in output and productivity in the manufacturing sector

airline seat allocation with multiple nested fare classes this paper addresses the problem of determining optimal booking policies for multiple fare classes that share the same seating pool on one leg of an airline flight when seats are booked in a nested fashion and when lower fare classes book before higher ones we show that a fixed limit booking policy that maximizes expected revenue can be characterized by a simple set of conditions on the subdifferential of the expected revenue function these conditions are appropriate for either the discrete or continuous demand cases these conditions are further simplified to a set of conditions that relate the probability distributions of demand for the various fare classes to their respective fares the latter conditions are guaranteed to have a solution when the joint probability distribution of demand is continuous characterization of the problem as a series of monotone optimal stopping problems proves optimality of the fixed limit policy over all admissible policies a comparison is made of the optimal solutions

a multiproduct dynamic pricing problem and its applications to network yield management a firm has inventories of a set of components that are used to produce a set of products there is a finite horizon over which the firm can sell its products demand for each product is a stochastic point process with an intensity that is a function of the vector of prices for the products and the time at which these prices are offered the problem is to price the finished products so as to maximize total expected revenue over the finite sales horizon an upper bound on the optimal expected revenue is established by analyzing a deterministic version of the problem the solution to the deterministic problem suggests two heuristics for the stochastic problem that are shown to be asymptotically optimal as the expected sales volume tends to infinity several applications of the model to network yield management are given numerical examples illustrate both the range of problems that can be modeled under this framework and the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics the results provide several fundamental insights into the performance of yield management systems

demand side vs supply side technology policies hidden treatment and new empirical evidence on the policy mix this paper provides new empirical evidence about the impact of various technological policies upon firms innovative behaviour we take into consideration the role of policies for innovative activities and we focus on their interaction while supply side policies such as r d subsidies and tax credits have been both extensively discussed in the literature and empirically investigated the analysis of innovative public procurement is a growing trend in the literature which still lacks robust empirical evidence in this paper we replicate the existing results on supply side policies surmise fresh empirical evidence on the outcome of innovative public procurement and address the issue of possible interaction among the various tools when controlling for the interaction with other policies supply side subsidies cease to be as effective as reported in previous studies and innovative public procurement seems to be more effective than other tools the preliminary evidence suggests that technology policies exert the highest impact when different policies interact

price guarantees in dynamic pricing and revenue management we present a new model for revenue management of product sales that incorporates both dynamic pricing and a price guarantee the guarantee provides customers with compensation if prior to a fixed future date the price of the product drops below a level specified at the time of purchase we consider the problem of simultaneously determining optimal dynamic price and guarantee policies for items from a fixed stock when demand depends both on the price and on the parameters of the price guarantee the model can be used for pricing any items with limited availability over a fixed time horizon we formulate this model as a discrete time optimal control problem prove the existence of its optimal solution explore some of the structural properties of the solution present lower bounding heuristics for solving the problem and report numerical results

an integrated product planning model for pricing and bundle selection using markov decision processes and data envelope analysis abstract when bundling products during the product planning stage there are a number of possible combinations that can be offered to customers consider a firm that offers n distinctive products then there are 2 n n 1 possible bundling combinations now if we wish to make pricing and bundle selection decisions keeping in my mind limited inventory and a finite time horizon then the size of the state space could be very large and finding an optimal solution could be impossible to tackle this issue we formulate an integrated model that utilizes a markov decision process and data envelope analysis bundle selections are made using data envelope analysis in each decision epoch once the efficient bundles are selected they are priced by solving a markov decision process using dynamic programming numerical examples are solved to exhibit the model s potential in solving real world problems

ethics in tax practice a study of the effect of practitioner firm size while much of the empirical accounting literature suggests that if differences do exist big four employees are more ethical than non big four employees this trend has not been evident in the recent media coverage of big four tax practitioners acting for multinationals accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour however there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice we aim here to address this gap initially exploring tax practitioners perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved we then proceed to assess quantitatively whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners using a tax context specific adaptation of a well known and validated psychometric instrument the defining issues test

joint pricing procurement control under fluctuating raw material costs abstract we consider a firm that periodically procures raw material units stores them and processes them into finished products upon order arrivals the raw material cost evolves in a markovian fashion whereas the demand process is influenced by both the raw material cost and sales prices charged by the firm the firm controls both the raw material procurement activity and sales price in each period we show the optimality of base stock list price type of policies with the additional raw cost dependence under conditions that are verifiable when the firm engages in price competition with other firms tapping into the same raw material market and when the raw material cost process has time continuity and mean reversion tendencies we identify two monotone patterns in which policy parameters should follow as the raw material cost fluctuates cost increases are also shown to translate into price increases at low inventory levels in other circumstances however there does not appear to be a clear pattern as to how the firm should pass cost increases on to end customers our numerical evidence unequivocally supports the adaptation of procurement and pricing controls to changing raw material costs

technical note price trends in a dynamic pricing model with heterogeneous customers a martingale perspective this note describes probabilistic properties of optimal price sample paths in a dynamic pricing model with a finite horizon and limited stock we assume that customer arrivals follow a nonhomogeneous poisson process we show that if customers willingness to pay increases rapidly over time then the optimal price process follows a submartingale which implies an upward price trend alternatively if customers willingness to pay decreases rapidly over time then the optimal price process follows a supermartingale which implies a downward price trend

the effects of mission oriented public r d spending on private industry this paper addresses the question of how government mission oriented r d spending affects private r d spending and thereby the total investment in technology the problem is approached within the context of the capital asset pricing model in which the firm views investment projects in terms of their risk and return characteristics the firm is assumed to produce jointly an established product and an r d intensive product where the latter generates an additional output of technology or spillover that is used as an input into the former by investing in r d the firm alters its risk and return characteristics in two ways through the expected profits from the sale of the r d intensive good and through the expected profits from the spillover in this model government mission oriented r d contracting affects the firm by enabling it to separate to some extent these two sources of risk and return the main implication of the analysis is that while some public crowding out of private r d is likely this is almost certain to be incomplete the empirical evidence from the u s transport industry supports the model and suggests that each dollar of government funding adds around 92 cents to total r d spending crowding out private investment by as little as eight percent private companies in the united states perform a great deal of publicly funded r d contract work notably in connection with defence space exploration energy and health this work is generally believed to make two contributions to society a direct effect of providing technology intensive public goods and an indirect or spillover effect into the technology content of the private goods produced by the firms which undertake the government contracts for example space technology has produced heart pacemakers alongside cryogenic insulation materials while automatic instrument landing systems benefit holidaymakers as well as air force pilots

dynamic price competition with discrete customer choices abstract for many years dynamic pricing has proven to be an effective tool to increase revenue in the airline and other service industries most studies however focused on monopolistic models and ignored the fact that nowadays consumers can easily compare prices on the internet in this paper we develop a game theoretic model to describe real time dynamic price competition between firms that sell substitutable products by assuming the real time inventory levels of all firms are public information we show the existence of nash equilibrium we then discuss how a firm can adapt if it knows only the initial but not the real time inventory levels of its competitors we compare a firm s expected revenue under different information structures through numerical experiments

dynamic pricing and warranty policies for products with fixed lifetime abstract we consider a repairable product with known market entry and departure times a warranty policy is offered with product purchase under which a customer can have a failed item repaired free of charge in the warranty period it is assumed that customers are heterogeneous in their risk attitudes toward uncertain repair costs incurred after the warranty expires the objective is to determine a joint dynamic pricing and warranty policy for the lifetime of the product which maximizes the manufacturer s expected profit in the first part of the analysis we consider a linearly decreasing price function and a constant warranty length we first study customers purchase patterns under several different pricing strategies by the manufacturer and then discuss the optimal pricing and warranty strategy in the second part we assume that the warranty length can be altered once during the product lifetime in developing a joint pricing and warranty policy numerical studies show that a dynamic warranty policy can significantly outperform a fixed length warranty policy

technical note personalized dynamic pricing of limited inventories prior work has investigated time and inventory level dependent pricing of limited inventories with finite selling horizons we consider a third dimension in addition to time and inventory level that the firms can use in setting their prices the information that the firm has at the individual customer level an arriving customer provides a signal to the firm which is an imperfect indicator of the customer s willingness to pay and the firm makes a personalized price offer depending on the signal inventory level and time we consider two different models full personalization and partial personalization in the full personalization model the firm charges any price it wishes given the customer signal while in the partial personalization model the firm can charge one of two prices we find that a mere correlation between the signals and customers willingness to pay is not sufficient to ensure intuitive relationships between the signal and the optimal prices we determine a stronger condition which leads to several structural properties including the monotonicity of the optimal price with respect to the signal in the full personalization model for the partial personalization model we show that the optimal pricing policy is of threshold type and that the threshold is monotonic in the inventory level and time

the stochastic knapsack revisited switch over policies and dynamic pricing the stochastic knapsack has been used as a model in wide ranging applications from dynamic resource allocation to admission control in telecommunication in recent years a variation of the model has become a basic tool in studying problems that arise in revenue management and dynamic flexible pricing and it is in this context that our study is undertaken based on a dynamic programming formulation and associated properties of the value function we study in this paper a class of control that we call switch over policies start by accepting only orders of the highest price and switch to including lower prices as time goes by with the switch over times optimally decided via convex programming we establish the asymptotic optimality of the switch over policy and develop pricing models based on this policy to optimize the price reductions over the decision horizon

optimal dynamic pricing and replenishment cycle for non instantaneous deterioration items with inventory level dependent demand abstract this paper considers a problem of determining the optimal dynamic pricing strategy and replenishment cycle for non instantaneous deteriorating items where the consumer demand depends on the sales price and the quantity of the items displayed in the store for the given replenishment cycle we derive the optimal dynamic pricing strategy by applying pontryagin s maximum principle and then design an effective algorithm to obtain the optimal dynamic pricing strategy and replenishment cycle simultaneously numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and solution procedure furthermore sensitivity analysis of the key system parameters is carried out and some interesting managerial insights are presented