Managing Capacity Through Reward Programs

Byung-Do Kim (), Mengze Shi and Kannan Srinivasan ()
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Byung-Do Kim: College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, 56-1 Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-ku, Seoul, 151-742, Korea
Kannan Srinivasan: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Management Science, 2004, vol. 50, issue 4, 503-520

Abstract: Rewarding customers with own products or services has become an increasingly popular practice across a spectrum of industries such as airlines, hotels, and telecommunication. In these service industries, firms face demand uncertainty and strict short-term capacity constraint. When the market demand is low, firms hold excess capacities that would lead to intense price competition. In this paper we study the adoption and design of reward programs in the context of capacity management. We demonstrate that it is optimal for firms to offer capacity rewards when the market demand varies from one period to the other. By offering the reward programs, firms can effectively reduce available capacities when the market demand is low, and hence credibly show their unwillingness to undersell. Such a commitment can encourage their competitors to set their prices high. When firms provide reward programs, if a firm sets a higher price than the other and sells less today, in the future the firm can benefit from the other firm's larger reduction in available capacity through rewards. Thus, reward programs also provide additional incentives for firms to set higher current prices. Finally, since reward programs can add flexibility in adjusting the available capacities to the market demand, firms increase the size of regular capacities with reward programs.

Keywords: capacity management; competition; pricing under capacity constraints; reward programs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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