香港科技大学于漫老师9月25日下午3:00在385做学术报告,欢迎大家积极参加。

Speaker：Man Yu

Abstract:

Advance selling has been a standard marketing approach in selling many service and non-service products (such as books and popular electronic devices). The crux of advance selling is separating

the time that customers purchase a product from the time that the product is consumed. Through advance selling, sellers offer customers an opportunity to purchase products early to get guaranteed

availability at consumption time. On the other hand, customers need to decide whether to buy in advance or wait until spot, when it is very close to consumption time and the exact valuations of the product become known. Meanwhile, due to the nature of different products, customers' valuations at the consumption time can be highly independent (when personal factors dominate) or closely correlated (when common factors prevail), resulting in qualitatively different markets in spot.

Our focus in this paper is to examine the effects of customer valuation interdependence and the seller's capacity on optimal advance selling strategies. We evaluate when and what type of advance selling

(premium or discount advance price, the form of rationing) should be deployed in different environments. We show that both customer valuation interdependence and capacity play critical roles in advance selling. Our models and insights are well aligned with several examples in practice.

This talk is based on a joint work with Roman Kapuscinski and Hyun-Soo Ahn in Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

Bio:

Man Yu is an assistant professor in Department of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management at the HKUST business school. She received her PhD in Business Administration from Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and her B.S. and M.S. in Management Science from School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include pricing and revenue management with explicit modeling of customer behavior, interfaces of operations and marketing, and supply chain management.