Title: Dynamic Pricing with Reference Price Effects

Speaker: 胡鹏教授，华中科技大学

Time: 9:00-10:00, April 12, 2017   Room: N602, AMSS, CAS

Abstract: This study analyzes a single-product dynamic pricing problem in which demand at each period depends on not only the current price but also past prices through reference prices. A unique feature but also a significant challenge in this model is the asymmetry in reference price effect. For the loss-averse case, we identify a few key structural properties and develop a novel bisection method to compute the optimal prices very efficiently for several plausible scenarios. For the gain-seeking case, we find that even the myopic pricing strategy belongs to one type of discontinuous maps, which can exhibit complex dynamics over time. Nevertheless, we show for a special case that a cyclic skimming pricing strategy is optimal, and we provide conditions to guarantee the optimality of high-low pricing strategies.

Biography:

Education:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL, U.S.A

PhD in Operations Research

Department of Industrial & Enterprise System Engineering (2006 –2011)

Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China

Master of Science, Operations Research & Cybernetics

Key Laboratory of Systems and Control (2003 –2006)

Peking University Beijing, China

Bachelor of Science, Statistics

Department of Probability and Statistics (1999 –2003)

Research Interests

1．Production, Pricing, Inventory and Supply Chain Management,

2．Optimization, Operations Research

Teaching Experiences:

Quality Management, 2012 –

Warehouse Management, 2012, 2013, 2016

Stochastic Process, 2012 –2016

Advanced Operations Research, 2017-