Pricing strategy and resource management in the digital era

This dissertation addresses pricing strategy and resource management for new business practices in two specific areas (electronic retailing and broadband internet access services). The dissertation research develops mathematical models for analyzing business practices and provides analytical analyses as well as computational experiments that enable the deployment and use of these models to improve managerial decisions.;The first essay studies stockout compensation policies for an electronic retailer where the retailer could offer a price discount to compensate for product unavailability during stockout. We demonstrate that stockout compensation can increase the retailer's profit as well as customer surplus.;The second essay develops economic models to examine another new business practice, dual mechanism, where an online retailer combines two commonly used selling mechanisms (posted price and auction). We demonstrate that there is a unique thresh old in each period that guides a customer's choice between posted price and auction. Through computational experiments, we discuss the performance of the dual mechanism compared to posted price and auction.;Finally, the third essay identifies new possibilities for marketing of broadband services, analyzes the application of quality-contingent pricing to broadband access services, and demonstrates that contingency pricing can be an effective way to address performance uncertainty and that contingency pricing can help achieve market segmentation.