Dynamic Pricing of Perishable Assets Under Competition

Guillermo Gallego () and Ming Hu ()
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Guillermo Gallego: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Ming Hu: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada

Management Science, 2014, vol. 60, issue 5, 1241-1259

Abstract: We study dynamic price competition in an oligopolistic market with a mix of substitutable and complementary perishable assets. Each firm has a fixed initial stock of items and competes in setting prices to sell them over a finite sales horizon. Customers sequentially arrive at the market, make a purchase choice, and then leave immediately with some likelihood of no purchase. The purchase likelihood depends on the time of purchase, product attributes, and current prices. The demand structure includes time-variant linear and multinomial logit demand models as special cases. Assuming deterministic customer arrival rates, we show that any equilibrium strategy has a simple structure, involving a finite set of shadow prices measuring capacity externalities that firms exert on each other: equilibrium prices can be solved from a one-shot price competition game under the current-time demand structure, taking into account capacity externalities through the time-invariant shadow prices. The former reflects the transient demand side at every moment, and the latter captures the aggregate supply constraints over the sales horizon. This simple structure sheds light on dynamic revenue management problems under competition, which helps capture the essence of the problems under demand uncertainty. We show that the equilibrium solutions from the deterministic game provide precommitted and contingent heuristic policies that are asymptotic equilibria for its stochastic counterpart, when demand and supply are sufficiently large. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management .

Keywords: revenue management; oligopoly; dynamic pricing; open-loop; feedback strategy; differential game; stochastic game; approximate dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

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