管理科学系学术讲座

时间：2024年4月19日（周五） 10:00-11:00

地点：管理学院思源楼524室

主题：Dynamic Pricing for Multi-Product Consumer Electronics Trade-in Program

主讲人：Zhou, Sean Xiang（周翔）香港中文大学商学院教授

主持人：戴悦复旦大学管理学院教授

摘要：

We consider a dynamic pricing problem for a consumer electronics trade-in program, where a firm acquires and re-sells multiple types of pre-owned (used) products over a finite selling horizon. The trade-in program offers two options: trade-in-for-cash, where customers sell their products to the firm and receive a cash payment, and trade-in-for-upgrade, where the customers exchange their products for new products at discounted prices. The firm sets trade-in prices (both cash rewards and new products' discounts) and resale prices to maximize its total expected profit. Customer arrivals follow independent Poisson processes and their choices on both used product trade-in and refurbished product purchase follow the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model. Given the challenge of solving the optimal policy using dynamic programming due to high dimensional state space, we develop simple and provably effective heuristic policies based on the solution to a deterministic upper-bound problem. We first propose a policy termed Static Control (SC) policy that computes prices before the start of the selling horizon. We show that its profit loss (relative to the optimal profit) is in the order of，which matches that of the best possible stationary policy, where T is the number of selling periods. We then design a dynamic policy called the Batched-Adjustment Control (BAC) policy. Under BAC, the selling horizon is divided into different consecutive and disjoint batches for different products and the prices in one batch are updated based on the realized uncertainties in the previous batch. The profit loss of BAC is in the order of . We numerically show that both policies perform well and BAC has superior performance over SC. Finally, we study three extensions of our model: Initial stocking of new products (for upgrade purposes), additional features of trade-in programs, and vertically differentiated products. We extend the dynamic policy and its theoretical performance analysis to all three extensions. This is joint work with Murray Lei (Queen’s University) and Zhuoluo Zhang (Xiamen University).

简介:

Sean Zhou is Professor and Chair of Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology, CUHK Business School, and Professor in Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (by courtesy), at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He has held visiting positions at National University of Singapore and University of Toronto. He received his PhD in Operations Research from North Carolina State University. His main research interests are inventory management, pricing, sustainable operations, data-driven supply chain optimization, and operations and marketing interface. He serves as Area Editor (Inventory and Supply Chain Optimization) of OR Letters and on the editorial board of various journals including Naval Research Logistics and Service Science.