Make-to-order (MTO) systems have been traditionally popular in manufacturing industries that either seek to provide greater variety to their customers or make products that are unique to their customers. More recently, with shrinking product life cycles, there is an increasing interest in operating as MTO systems. With the tremendous success of revenue management techniques in the service industries over the last three decades, there is a growing interest in applying these techniques in MTO manufacturing industries. In the present work, we consider three problems that apply revenue management (RM) to on-date delivery MTO systems. In the first problem, we assume that all orders completed in advance of their due-dates are stored at third party warehouses and apply RM in computing efficient order acceptance and scheduling policies. We develop an optimal solution scheme, and based on the insights gained on the structural properties of the optimal solution, we develop a stochastic approximation scheme for finding efficient solutions. Through computational studies on simulated problems, we illustrate the potential of RM in improving net profits over popular practices. In our second problem, we extend the RM model to consider presence of a certain amount of first party warehousing capacity for storing the orders completed in advance of their due-dates. We study the conditions under which it is desirable to consider the holding cost aspects in the RM model. In our third problem, we develop a scheme for determining an efficient capacity of the first party warehouse that is used for storing the orders completed in advance of their due-dates at an on-date delivery MTO system. This scheme captures the completed orders storage demand resulting from a RM based order acceptance and scheduling policy. We illustrate that when booking horizon is large, considerable amount of savings in the holding costs can be made with an efficiently sized first party warehouse.

In this thesis we investigate important issues in the area of dynamic pricing for revenue management. Studying the effect of competition and strategic consumer behavior, we characterize the dynamic pricing policies for retailers who sell homogeneous goods in multi-period, discrete time, finite horizon settings. In the first essay an impatient consumer visits only one of two competing retailers in each period. If he does not purchase the good, he visits the competing retailer in the ensuing period. Compared to the corresponding single store monopoly, when the consumer’s valuation is uniformly distributed, prices decline exponentially rather than linearly, with a dramatically lower initial price, and a substantially lower system profit. The model is extended to accommodate many consumers, who may be either identical or similar, a more general valuation distribution, and situations wherein capacities are limited. The base case of a centralized two-store monopoly is also examined. In the second essay the consumer may return to the same retailer with some certain probability. This probability is either affected by market structure characteristics, or it may depend on the consumer’s experience at the last store visited. The robustness of the exponential decline of prices is reinforced. It occurs even when a strong retailer faces competition from a relatively much weaker retailer. We investigate the impact of the return probabilities on prices, profits, and consumer surplus. The model is extended to an oligopoly, and to situations with many similar consumers. The effect of strategic consumer behavior on prices and profits is revealed in the third essay. Characterizing the pricing policies arising in a two-period monopoly and duopoly settings, we find that strategic consumer behavior inflicts larger losses to a duopoly than to a monopoly. A lower strategic consumers’ discounting factor, which is beneficial to a monopoly, may be harmful to a duopoly. Ignoring strategic consumer behaviour is costly to a monopoly, but may, on the other hand, be beneficial to a duopoly. An extension to three periods is studied, and with longer horizons the model is analyzed for the case when all the consumers are strategic.

University, Diss.--Tilburg, 2006.

Thesis - Hamburg, Helmut-Schmidt-Univ.,2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of Management Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-124)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-101).

Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, University, Diss., 2009.

In this thesis we investigate important issues in the area of dynamic pricing for revenue management. Studying the effect of competition and strategic consumer behavior, we characterize the dynamic pricing policies for retailers who sell homogeneous goods in multi-period, discrete time, finite horizon settings. In the first essay an impatient consumer visits only one of two competing retailers in each period. If he does not purchase the good, he visits the competing retailer in the ensuing period. Compared to the corresponding single store monopoly, when the consumer’s valuation is uniformly distributed, prices decline exponentially rather than linearly, with a dramatically lower initial price, and a substantially lower system profit. The model is extended to accommodate many consumers, who may be either identical or similar, a more general valuation distribution, and situations wherein capacities are limited. The base case of a centralized two-store monopoly is also examined. In the second essay the consumer may return to the same retailer with some certain probability. This probability is either affected by market structure characteristics, or it may depend on the consumer’s experience at the last store visited. The robustness of the exponential decline of prices is reinforced. It occurs even when a strong retailer faces competition from a relatively much weaker retailer. We investigate the impact of the return probabilities on prices, profits, and consumer surplus. The model is extended to an oligopoly, and to situations with many similar consumers. The effect of strategic consumer behavior on prices and profits is revealed in the third essay. Characterizing the pricing policies arising in a two-period monopoly and duopoly settings, we find that strategic consumer behavior inflicts larger losses to a duopoly than to a monopoly. A lower strategic consumers’ discounting factor, which is beneficial to a monopoly, may be harmful to a duopoly. Ignoring strategic consumer behaviour is costly to a monopoly, but may, on the other hand, be beneficial to a duopoly. An extension to three periods is studied, and with longer horizons the model is analyzed for the case when all the consumers are strategic. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

Revenue Management (RM) is a process that is trying to understand, estimate and influence the behaviour of customers to maximize revenues. Constant development in the field of information and communication technology leads to the development of more efficient systems which boost decision-making in the revenue management. RM systems are based on 2 modules, prognostic and optimization. In order for both modules to provide the most accurate estimates and to find effective decisions on booking limits and prices, they need a huge amount of information on demand and other factors. The diploma thesis deals with the theory of income management, description of techniques used in RM, RM systems used in air transport and RM applications on selected airline.