New applications in Revenue Management

Abstract

Revenue Management (RM) is an area with important advances in theory and practice in the last thirty years. This thesis presents three different new applications in RM with a focus on: the firms' perspective, the government's perspective as a policy maker, and the consumers' perspective (in terms of welfare). In this thesis, we first present a two-part tariff pricing problem faced by a satellite data provider. We estimate unobserved data with parametric density functions in order to generate instances of the problem. We propose a mixed integer programming formulation for pricing. As the problem is hard to solve, we propose heuristics that make use of the MIP formulation together with intrinsic properties of the problem. Furthermore, we contrast this approach with a dynamic programming approach. Both methodologies outperform the current pricing strategy of the satellite provider, even assuming misspecifications in the assumptions made. Subsequently, we study how the government can encourage green technology adoption through a rebate to consumers. We model this setting as a Stackleberg game where firms interact in a price-setting competing newsvendor problem where the government gives a rebate to consumers in the first stage. We show the trade-off between social welfare when the government decides an adoption target instead of a utilitarian objective. Then, we study the impact of competition and demand uncertainty on the three agents involved: firms, government, and consumers. This thesis recognizes the need to measure consumers' welfare for multiple items under demand uncertainty. As a result, this thesis builds on existing theory in order to incorporate demand uncertainty in Consumer Surplus. In many settings, produced quantities might not meet the realized demand at a given market price. This comes as an obstacle in the computation of consumer surplus. To address this, we define the concept of an allocation rule. In addition, we study the impact of uncertainty on consumers for different demand noise (additive and multiplicative) and for various allocation rules.