Research On Pricing Models For Perishable Products In Stochastic Environment

Due to economic globalization, product proliferation and technological progress, customer demand becomes highly uncertain across many industry sectors, which brings the huge difficulties to the enterprises. Compare to the other kind products or services, the perishable products have some special characters, such as the shorter product life cycle, the more discriminating customers demand, the more fierce market competition, which make the enterprises face the more stern challenge. It has become an urgent topic in both theoretical field and practical field how to make out feasible prices for the competition dominance and the enterprises' continuously developing.The dynamic pricing based on revenue management has been the efficient tool in solving the problem of price of perishable products. It optimizes the enterprises' existing resources by scientific prediction of market requirements and reasonable prices without increasing costs. Firstly it is widely used in such service industry as aviation and gets good results. Then it is gradually applied in other service industries, e.g. hotel, car rental, broadcasting, Internet service, even in manufacturing industry. Though the theory of revenue management can be applied in the vary industries, there is the obvious difference in the market mechanism, and the manner must be reasonably specified and defined based on industrial features.The theory and application of revenue management on container shipping industry, retail trade and Internet services industry is emphasized. For some reason there is little application of revenue management on these industries. With opening to WTO, our country faces more and more competitions, and it is necessary to improve the service level of these industries based on revenue management. So three stochastic pricing problems are studied due to various industrial features, and the main content is listed as follows:(1) Pricing Model for Perishable products in container shipping industry. To gain maximum expected revenue, pricing model of container liner shipping is proposed. The optimized pricing equation is drawn under the condition that demand is a Poisson process and reservation price is exponential distribution or weibull distribution, and the whole optimized policies are drawn by the analytical measure. Finally, the characters of optimal price are drawn and numerical example is provided.(2) Pricing Model for Perishable products in retail trade. The discrete-inventory model and the continuous-inventory model are both discussed respectively. And the character of the time to deterioration is represented. For continuous-inventory condition, dynamic pricing model of deteriorating items is proposed to gain maximum expected revenue, which is a continuous-inventory and discrete-time revenue management model. Then optimal solution is drawn by dynamic programming recursions based on a price-setting newsvendor problem. Finally, it is found how items deterioration is influential to price, expected revenue and inventory by numerical examples. For discrete-inventory condition, dynamic pricing model of deteriorating items is proposed, which is a continuous-time revenue management model based on a set of discrete price levels. Then we show a subset of these prices which form a concave envelope is potentially optimal, and draw the optimal solution by dynamic programming recursions. Finally, it is found how items deterioration is influential to the optimal solutionby numerical examples.(3) Pricing Model for Perishable products in Internet services industry. The pricing problems for traditional perishable products and AdWords are discussed. For traditional perishable products condition, the optimal pricing problem with the group-buying auction is mainly studied. Since the function of seller's expected revenue is difficult for the normal function optimization methods to solve, the QPSO with the extremum disturbed arithmetic operators is introduced to settle it. Then the auction time is introduced into the model as decision variable, and the failure reason of the group-buying auction is discussed. For AdWords condition, the AdWords auction model with reserve price is proposed, and we analyze the strategy of bidders and the optimal auction mechanism of search engine providers. Then, it is analyzed how reserve price is influential to the bidding strategies and search engine providers' expected revenue. On the basis of the above, Ad Words are classified, and the various Ad Words' principles of setting reserve price are drawn by numerical simulation. Finally, the method of setting reserve price is proposed.