Ozge Sahin

Dynamic Pricing of Substitutable Products in the Presence of Capacity Flexibility

Firms that offer multiple products are often susceptible to periods of inventory mismatches where one product may face shortages while the other has excess inventories. In this paper, we study a joint implementation of price- and capacity-based substitution mechanisms to alleviate the level of such inventory disparities. We consider a firm producing substitutable products via a capacity portfolio consisting of both product-dedicated and flexible resources and characterize the structure of the optimal production and pricing decisions. We then explore how changes in various problem parameters affect the optimal policy structure. We show that the availability of a flexible resource helps maintain stable price differences across products over time even though the price of each product may fluctuate over time. This result has favorable ramifications from a marketing standpoint because it suggests that even when a firm applies a dynamic pricing strategy, it may still establish consistent price positioning among...

The Impact of Consumer Search Cost on Assortment Planning and Pricing

Consumers search for product information to resolve valuation uncertainties before purchase. We incorporate search cost into consumer choice models and study the two-stage consider-then-choose policy. In the first stage, a consumer forms her consideration set by balancing utility uncertainty and search cost. In the second stage, she evaluates all products in her consideration set and chooses the one with the highest net utility. We show that the revenue-ordered assortment (i.e., the offer set that includes products in the revenue-decreasing order) fails to be optimal, although it can obtain at least half the optimal revenue. We propose a k-quasi-attractiveness-ordered assortment and show that it can be arbitrarily near optimal for the market share maximization problem. The assortment problems with search cost are generally NP-hard, so we develop efficient approximation or relatively fast exact algorithms for a variety of assortment problems under the consider-then-choose models with search cost. For the j...

Pricing of Conditional Upgrades in the Presence of Strategic Consumers

In this paper, we study a conditional upgrade strategy that has recently emerged in the travel industry. After a consumer makes a reservation for a product (e.g., a hotel room), she is asked whether she would like to upgrade her product to a higher-quality (more expensive) one at a discounted price. The upgrade, however, is not fulfilled immediately. The firm fulfills upgrades at check-in if higher-quality products are still available, and the upgrade fee is charged to the consumer if and only if she actually gets upgraded. Consumers decide which product type to book and whether to accept an upgrade offer or not based on the anticipated upgrade probability. We find that conditional upgrades create value by improving demand–supply matching for the firm. The firm can use the conditional upgrade channel to flexibly manage capacity allocations and reoptimize demand segmentation. For a firm that takes product prices as given, offering conditional upgrades is effective in compensating for the firm’s lack of abi...

Optimal Pricing of Access and Secondary Goods with Repeat Purchases: Evidence from Online Grocery Shopping and Delivery Fees

In this paper, we investigate optimal pricing strategies for an online grocery retailer that derives its profits from delivery fees and grocery sales. We base our theoretical framework on the well-established work of Schmalensee (1981) in two-part pricing, while allowing for repeat purchase occasions. We derive testable implications that we take to data using a unique dataset detailing transaction information from an online grocery retailer in a Western European country. We find that an increase in the number of deliveries is associated with a greater-than proportional increase in grocery sales, implying that preferences for deliveries and groceries are negatively correlated. Therefore, counter to the current popularity of free shipping, the observed strategy of discounting groceries and charging high delivery fees appears to be optimal in our empirical setting.

Impact of Parallel Imports on Pricing and Product Launch Decisions in Pharmaceutical Industry

Product launch and pricing decisions in the pharmaceutical industry across different countries are complex. Although introducing a newly developed drug to every country is beneficial for patients worldwide, doing so may have adverse implications for drug developers, such as the emergence of parallel imports. We study a pharmaceutical firm that already introduced a pioneering drug in its home country, where the product is protected by patent rules. The firm decides whether to launch in a second country in the same region, where parallel import between these two countries is feasible and profitable for the parallel importer. We characterize the joint pricing and product launch decision. We show the firm chooses one of three strategies: (i) launch and accommodate parallel import, (ii) launch and deter parallel import, and (iii) not launch. We show that firms are more likely not to launch the drug when the drug price is determined through a negotiation between the firm and the government. We discuss how insurance coverage, market size, quality perception of the parallel imported drug, and valuations affect these strategies. We then study the impact of launch and pricing decisions on social welfare and discuss policy implications for the regulators and potential strategies for the firm to mitigate the negative effects of a parallel import threat. We also study the impact of perfect and imperfect competition among parallel import firms on pharmaceutical firms price and launch decisions. Finally, we discuss a common practice of distributing rebates in the home country as a post-launch strategy, and characterize the optimal rebate amount to deter or accommodate parallel import.

Dynamic pricing of sustainable products in the presence of capacity flexibility

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