讲座题目：Opaque Selling and Last-Minute Selling: Revenue Management in Vertically Differentiated Markets

报告人：Dr. Hang Ren, Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Operations Management, School of Business, George Mason University

讲座时间：2019年7月3日星期三上午：10:00-11:30

讲座地点：管理学院3楼313教室

讲座内容：Opaque selling has been applied to dispose of excess inventory in many industries. The existing literature has analyzed its performance in comparison to the classic last-minute selling strategy (i.e., selling the leftover products separately) in horizontally differentiated markets. However, it remains unclear how opaque selling performs in vertically differentiated markets. To address this question, we consider a dynamic pricing model in which a firm sells vertically differentiated products across two periods to strategic consumers. We characterize the firm's optimal selling strategy and find that opaque selling may outperform last-minute selling because it increases the regular price by reducing the effective quality of products offered to the high-valuation consumers in the sales season. Its disadvantage, however, lies in the inflexibility of segmenting heterogeneous-valuation consumers during sales. Both the advantage and the disadvantage are radically different from their counterparts in horizontally differentiated markets, and this contrast generates opposite policy recommendations across the two settings. Specifically, under vertical differentiation, the firm may switch from opaque selling to last-minute selling as consumers become more differentiated or the probability of a low demand increases. However, it always switches in the opposite direction under horizontal differentiation.

学者介绍：Hang Ren博士毕业于英国伦敦大学学院（University College London），现为乔治梅森大学（George Mason University）助理教授。主要研究方向为运营管理中的消费者行为研究、服务运营、零售运营、健康运营、可持续运营管理以及运营&营销交互。他的研究成果在Production & Operations Management, Naval Research Logistics, Computers & Operations Research等高水平期刊上发表。