2021年11月23日上午，现代供应链管理研究院第五十九期学术论坛如期举行，本次论坛采用线上方式召开。本次论坛的主讲人是新加坡国立大学商学院左瑞婷博士，其报告题目为“Incentive Design and Dynamic Pricing under Limited Inventory”。
左博士分享结束后，详细地解答了观众提出的问题。未来，我院会继续努力为各位学者提供高质量科研交流平台建设，促进学者间的交流讨论，从而推动相关研究的发展。
【摘要】
A firm faces random demand for a service it delivers on a given future date. To boost the demand, the firm hires a sales agent who exerts unobservable effort continuously over time. The firm is concerned not only about boosting current demand, but also about smoothing the demand over time to avoid the loss of goodwill when the realized demand exceeds its limited inventory. We model the firm's incentive design problem using a continuous-time principal-agent framework in which demand drifts over time in response to unobserved agent effort and the price the firm charges. To induce the agent's sales effort, the firm chooses an incentive scheme that depends on the remaining inventory and the time to the service (e.g., time to departure in the case of airlines). We characterize the firm's optimal incentive scheme under both static and dynamic pricing policies. Using parameters calibrated from the airline industry, we numerically show that under dynamic pricing, a static incentive scheme provides nearly all of the benefit of the corresponding dynamic incentive scheme. By contrast, using a fully static strategy causes a substantial efficiency loss. We also compare two partially dynamic strategies under which the firm practices either dynamic pricing or dynamic contracting, but not both. Among other findings, we show that all else being equal, under a high inventory level, the dynamic-contracting-only strategy tends to outperform the dynamic-pricing-only strategy; under a tight inventory level, however, the dynamic-pricing-only strategy tends to perform better.
【主讲人简介】
Ruiting Zuo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Analytics and Operations, at National University of Singapore (NUS). Prior to this, she received her Bachelor of Engineering from Zhejiang University and a Master’s degree in Quantitative Finance from National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interests are in the area of operations management, operations-marketing interface, incentive design, finance-operations interface, financial engineering, revenue management and data-driven analytics.
撰稿人：刘昱含
审核人：张颖
