香港科技大学于漫老师9月25日下午3:00在385做学术报告，欢迎大家积极参加。

Speaker:Man Yu

Abstract:

Advance selling has been a standard marketing approach in

selling many service and non-service products (such as books and

popular electronic devices). The crux of advance selling is separating

the time that customers purchase a product from the time that the

product is consumed. Through advance selling, sellers offer customers

an opportunity to purchase products early to get guaranteed

availability at consumption time. On the other hand, customers need to

decide whether to buy in advance or wait until spot, when it is very

close to consumption time and the exact valuations of the product become known.

Meanwhile, due to the nature of different products, customers'

valuations at the consumption time can be highly independent (when

personal factors dominate) or closely correlated (when common factors prevail),

resulting in qualitatively different markets in spot.

Our focus in this paper is to examine the effects of customer

valuation interdependence and the seller's capacity on optimal advance

selling strategies. We evaluate when and what type of advance selling

(premium or discount advance price, the form of rationing) should be

deployed in different environments. We show that both customer

valuation interdependence and capacity play critical roles in advance

selling. Our models and insights are well aligned with several examples in practice.

This talk is based on a joint work with Roman Kapuscinski and Hyun-Soo Ahn in Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

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Bio:

Man Yu is an assistant professor in Department of Information

Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management at the HKUST business school.

She received her PhD in Business Administration from Ross School of

Business, University of Michigan and her B.S. and M.S. in Management

Science from School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University.

Her research interests include pricing and revenue management with

explicit modeling of customer behavior, interfaces of operations and

marketing, and supply chain management.