Essays in revenue management and sales motivation.

摘要

This dissertation studies two factors which influence the demand the firm's face: (1) the pricing policy of the firm, and (2) the motivation of the salesforce.;The first and second parts of the thesis focus on the impact of the firm's pricing policy on demand, and subsequently, on the profits, in a revenue management setting. Revenue management is typically concerned with the rationing of a limited inventory among market segments with uncertain demands at given prices. Traditional revenue management models optimize inventory allocation in isolation of other functions and decisions of the firm, taking demand as an exogenous input. The first part of the thesis extends the standard revenue management framework by endogenizing demand as a stochastic function of price. In a static setting, we provide natural conditions on the stochastic demand model that (1) guarantee the uniqueness of the optimal joint pricing-allocation decision, and (2) preserve the predictions of the standard economic theory that prices should decrease with availability, and vice versa (these relationships are typically violated in a stochastic setting). Our demand assumptions are robust, guaranteeing similar results for joint pricing and newsvendor, and flexible manufacturing problems. Numerical experiments indicate that joint price-inventory maximization leads to significant profit benefits over the case when decisions are taken in isolation. The revenue impact is more significant the higher the load factor, and the uncertainty in demand.;In the second part of the thesis, we extend this static problem to a dynamic setting, by considering the firm's inter-temporal pricing decisions. Specifically, we study the problem of a firm which sells a fixed inventory over a finite time horizon, with no further opportunities for replenishment. This kind of model is commonly used in style and seasonal goods retail revenue management, where selling cycles are typically short. We extend the optimality conditions obtained for the static problem to a dynamic setting, and obtain monotonicity results with respect to the length of the selling horizon.;In the last part of the thesis, we consider another variable, which influences the firm's demand, the motivation of the salesforce. We study the sales agent's optimal effort behavior in trading off compensation utility with effort cost in a static and dynamic setting. We investigate the impact of the agent's preferences (such as his degree of risk aversion, disutility of effort), the firm's capabilities and HR decisions, and market conditions (size, variability) on the agent's optimal effort policy, and consequently, on demand. We identify conditions on the agent's value for sales (such as risk aversion, prudence, aggressiveness), that result in constant motivational patterns.