...Same point of departure, same destination, the same snacks. Why is it people sitting next to each other on the same flight can pay such different amounts for their tickets? Airline pricing seems to be a great mystery. The airline industry refers to their pricing game as “yield management” or “revenue management.” Meaning prices on the same plane can fluctuate widely based on available seats at the time of purchase. Even though this seems to defy logic (and textbook theory), there might just be a method, an algorithm, to the madness. In a perfectly competitive market, companies would have no power to discriminate by price. Price discrimination means that one is charging different prices to different consumers, whereby price cannot be explained by the differences in cost. In this type of environment, the price of airline seats would be a posted price and would stay the same until the flight would take off. This paper will try to rationalize the price discrimination that is ongoing in the airline industry, as well as seek to prove the optimality of certain routes via several online pricing sources. To price discriminate successfully, a company must have enough market power to be able to charge over marginal cost, and product resale is nearly non-existent. Although the resale of airline tickets is possible, it involves high search costs and does not eliminate restrictions such as blackout days or time-of-day-constraints. However, the airline industry is not predictable...
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...cannot be stored at all” (Netessine, 2002). Kimes and Wirtz (2003) defined revenue management as “the application of information systems and pricing strategies to allocate the right capacity to the right customer at the right price at the right time”. As pricing serves as an important factor in yield management, I would like to discuss the issues of pricing strategy regarding to the application of yield management. The pricing strategy involves in yield management is commonly known as price discrimination. The hotel or airline industries tend to use this most often due to the following industrial traits: 1. Fixed capacity 2. Predictable demand 3. Perishable inventory 4. Appropriate cost and pricing structures 5. Uncertainty of the demand There are 6 elements in Yield Management. According to Forgacs (2010), Yield Management consists of product definition, competitive benchmarking, strategic pricing, demand forecasting, business mix manipulation, and distribution channel management. [pic] Figure 1: Six elements of yield management (Forgacs 2010) The ideal situation for a hotel in a possible circumstance is to sell every room at the highest possible rate to maximise for profit maximisation purpose. To achieve this purpose, pricing strategy will be a crucial element. Pricing Strategy as a Profit Maximization Approach There is need for a hotel to...
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...Marketing principles Price discrimination Outline 1. Introduction............................................................................................................................3 2. Conditions for price discrimination........................................................................................3 3. Types of discrimination..........................................................................................................4 4. Advantages/Disadvantages of price discrimination...............................................................5 5. Economic explanation.............................................................................................................6 6. Examples of price discrimination......................................................................................7-16 7. Price discrimination in universities..............................................................................17 - 23 8. Summary.............................................................................................................................24 What is price discrimination? The goal of every business is to maximize its profits and they can achieve this goal by successfully determining the price of their products. There are many different ways to deal with determining the price of the products. All of these ways are called – pricing strategies. Price discrimination is one of many ways how companies may determine the price of their product...
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...Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet [Extended Abstract] Andrew Odlyzko Digital Technology Center, University of Minnesota 499 Walter Library, 117 Pleasant St. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA odlyzko@umn.edu http://www.dtc.umn.edu/∼odlyzko Revised version, July 27, 2003 Abstract. The rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles. Why is it occurring, and why do people care about it? This paper proposes an explanation for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing importance of price discrimination. Privacy appears to be declining largely in order to facilitate differential pricing, which offers greater social and economic gains than auctions or shopping agents. The thesis of this paper is that what really motivates commercial organizations (even though they often do not realize it clearly themselves) is the growing incentive to price discriminate, coupled with the increasing ability to price discriminate. It is the same incentive that has led to the airline yield management system, with a complex and constantly changing array of prices. It is also the same incentive that led railroads to invent a variety of price and quality differentiation schemes in the 19th century. Privacy intrusions serve to provide the information that allows sellers to determine buyers’ willingness to pay. They also allow monitoring of usage, to ensure that arbitrage is not used to bypass discriminatory pricing. Economically, price discrimination is usually regarded as desirable...
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...is it possible to reconcile the extremely high short-term volatility of real exchange rates with the glacial rate (15 percent per year) at which deviations from PPP seem to die out?’ (Rogoff, 1996, p. 664). To solve the PPP puzzle, numerous explanations arose including the core of this essay, Pricing to Market. The objective of this essay is threefold: (i) to explore and review the concept of Pricing to Market (PTM), (ii) to illustrate the implications of PTM for Purchasing Power Parity, and (iii) to analyse the empirical evidence of PTM. Initially, I will start with an overview of the concept of PTM in the first part of this essay, then go on to interpret the implications of PTM for the PPP hypothesis in the following paragraph and cover the empirical evidence concerning Pricing to Market in the last section. Main body Pricing to Market as a concept was first introduced by Krugman in 1987 to characterise the phenomenon of imported goods’ prices staying the same or even increasing when the domestic currency appreciates. In other words, it implies that producers are capable of price discriminating among different international markets (Knetter, 1989). The fact that price discrimination for certain types of goods arise in the international goods markets may be due to the difficulty or absence of international arbitrage. Particularly, differing national standards (for instance, left-hand-drive cars are not sold in the U.K.) or monopolistic firms’ ability may both impede international...
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...Managerial Economics Unit 4: Price discrimination Rudolf Winter-Ebmer Johannes Kepler University Linz Winter Term 2012 Managerial Economics: Unit 4 - Price discrimination 1 / 39 OBJECTIVES Objectives ◮ Explain how managers use price discrimination to increase profits ⋆ ⋆ Identify submarkets with different price elasticities of demand Segment the market and charge different prices to consumers in each submarket Managerial Economics: Unit 4 - Price discrimination 2 / 39 MOTIVATION FOR PRICE DISCRIMINATION Figure 8.1: Single-Price Monopolist Profit-Maximizing Outcome ◮ ◮ Single-price monopoly equilibrium fails to capture all consumer surplus and also results in a dead-weight loss. Price discrimination provides a strategic mechanism for capturing some, or all, of this lost surplus. Managerial Economics: Unit 4 - Price discrimination 3 / 39 Managerial Economics: Unit 4 - Price discrimination 4 / 39 PRICE DISCRIMINATION Price discrimination: When the same product is sold at more than one price ◮ ◮ Differences in price among similar products are not necessarily evidence of price discrimination; Costs could also be different. Managerial Economics: Unit 4 - Price discrimination 5 / 39 PRICE DISCRIMINATION First-Degree Price Discrimination ◮ ◮ ◮ ◮ ◮ All customers are charged a price equal to their reservation price. The firm captures 100 percent of the consumer surplus. Equilibrium output and marginal...
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...3 2.3 Implementation of Revenue Management 5 2.3.1 Objectives for Establishing Prices 5 2.3.2 Pricing Strategy 5 2.4 Methods of Revenue Management 6 2.4.1 Price Discrimination 6 2.4.2 Capacity Control 8 2.4.3 Overbooking 9 2.4.4 Dynamic Pricing 9 3 Case „Theater Hagen“ 10 3.1 Review of the criteria for application 10 3.2 Description of used methods 11 4 Conclusion 13 5 Reference 14 List of figures 1.1 Interdependence between criteria....................................................................4 1.2 Criteria for market segmentation.....................................................................7 1.3 Theatre hall plan...............................................................................................11 1.4 Pricing table......................................................................................................12 Introduction Revenue Management is pioneered by American airlines and is in practice since the “Airline-Deregulation-Act” from 1978. Since this act the airlines are free to set their prices the way they want to. Most of the airlines used this new opportunity to take advantage of their customer’s different levels of price sensitivity (Kimms & Klein, 2005, p. 2). Theoretically revenue management is part of the micro economical price theory and is often regarded as second degree price discrimination (Hermann Diller, 2007, p. 497). This paper wants to give an overview over the theory...
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...and consumer’s behaviors affect product prices. Consumers have shown different behaviors and impacts on market prices. In this paper, I will examine these issues. This will show how consumer behavior interacts with market behavior. I will also demonstrate how the use of price is a cue to quality, or can destroy the price-quality relationship. The first thing that I found out, by working at Home Depot is how responsive our market is to a change in price. This responsiveness is known as elasticity. I first learned this term in macroeconomics class. Products like tools, fixtures and lumber are highly inelastic. That is, regardless of whether the prices are raised or lowered, customers continue to purchase them in approximately the same quantities. Customers demand for elastic products do fluctuate with the price. A small change in prices either up or down will result in an increase or decrease in the number of units sold. Good examples of these are electronics, brand name shoes and clothing etc. The more elastic your product then the easier it is to raise your prices without hurting your sales. To increase your profits on highly elastic products rather than raising your prices you might try lowering them. Because although this reduces your profit on each unit sold the resulted increase in sales volume will probably increase your overall profits. I learned this lesson in business finance this semester. When a business sets s a price for their products, they set an amount which...
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...TOPIC 1: MARKET STRUCTURE AND MARKET POWER 1.1. Competitors Anyone that produces a substitute for a firm’s product. - Cross price elasticity: Measures the substitution degree of a product for another. P.E.>1 – The demand is elastic, a change in price is reflected as an even major change in demand. The extent of the variation is higher as higher is the substitution degree of a product for another. We can say two firms are competing when a price increase by one firm, drives its customers to the other firm. P.E. P (find higher prices). Relevant Geographic Market Imports and Transportation costs. b. Difficulties when defining a market Product differentiation is usually due to small characteristics of the product. e.g. Diet coke belongs to cola market, light cola market and soft drinks market. The idea of competitors today is completely different from the one we had in the past. Sometimes we need to look outside the industry. e.g. go by car with 4 persons vs go alone by train. 1.3.2. Market Structure: # and characteristics of firms in a market. a. Concentration in the market Concentration Index Simple measures to define the market are really useful to take antitrust decisions. It takes into consideration, the number and size of the firms. b. Measuring Market Structure - K-firm concentration ratio Once you have defined the market and relevant players, we define their MS%. Combined share of the k largest firms in the market. Ck = i , si is the MS of firm i and Ck Є...
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...Price Discrimination Price discrimination exists when sales of identical goods or services are transacted at different prices from the same provider. In a theoretical market with perfect information, no transaction costs or prohibition on secondary exchange (or re-selling) to prevent arbitrage, price discrimination can only be a feature of monopoly markets. Otherwise, the moment the seller tries to sell the same good at different prices, the buyer at the lower price can arbitrage by selling to the consumer buying at the higher price but with a tiny discount. However, market frictions in oligopolies such as the airlines, and even in fully competitive retail or industrial markets allow for a limited degree of differential pricing to different consumers. Price discrimination also occurs when it costs more to supply one customer than it does another, and yet the supplier charges both the same price. Although the term "discrimination" has negative (e.g. racist, sexist) connotations, the literal meaning of the word "discrimination" (from discriminatio, "a distinction") is neutral. "Price discrimination" is a technical term meaning only differentiation in price by customer, and is not intended as an accusation of criminal or unfairly biased behavior. The effects of price discrimination on social efficiency are unclear; typically such behavior leads to lower prices for some consumers and higher prices for others. Output can be expanded when price discrimination is very...
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...Praxis II: Marketing in the 21st Century by Daisy Chesley Marketing: Strategic Innovation in Globally Diverse Markets Walden University December 23, 2012 Abstract This paper will explore the potential evolution of the role of consumer marketing. I will examine the role of the retailer and the consumer on the Internet and the vital changes retailers must incorporate to stay competitive in the marketplace. In addition, I will discuss the role of personalized marketing, traditional advertising versus online advertising, changes in the marketplace attributable to globalization, the implications of interpersonal communications, and management of the 5Ps. Personalized Marketing Personalized marketing (sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing) is the marketer attempt to provide the customer individual attention through a variation of methods. Personalized marketing is a strategic approach which involves tailoring products differently for each and every consumer while retaining the principles of mass production. One-to-one marketing is attributable to two converging phenomena: the interactive flow of information made possible by robots and just-in-time inventory (Lampel & Mintzer, 1996, p. 21). In order for a company to be effective in personalized marketing, the company must be able to gather information on the target individual. Today, with the power of technology this is a widespread practice on the Internet. The Internet provides a medium to make...
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...Praxis II: Marketing in the 21st Century Marketing: Strategic Innovation in Globally Diverse Markets December 23, 2012 Abstract This paper will explore the potential evolution of the role of consumer marketing. I will examine the role of the retailer and the consumer on the Internet and the vital changes retailers must incorporate to stay competitive in the marketplace. In addition, I will discuss the role of personalized marketing, traditional advertising versus online advertising, changes in the marketplace attributable to globalization, the implications of interpersonal communications, and management of the 5Ps. Personalized Marketing Personalized marketing (sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing) is the marketer attempt to provide the customer individual attention through a variation of methods. Personalized marketing is a strategic approach which involves tailoring products differently for each and every consumer while retaining the principles of mass production. One-to-one marketing is attributable to two converging phenomena: the interactive flow of information made possible by robots and just-in-time inventory (Lampel & Mintzer, 1996, p. 21). In order for a company to be effective in personalized marketing, the company must be able to gather information on the target individual. Today, with the power of technology this is a widespread practice on the Internet. The Internet provides a medium to make one-on-one personalization practical for...
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...Managerial Economics Term Paper DEMAND IN THE DOMESTIC AIRLINE INDUSTRY OF INDIA Submitted by: Akshata Shirodkar ePGP-02-002 This term paper explores the rational economics behind the demand and its affect on dynamic pricing in the domestic airline industry in India, where both of these vary often with time and units available. Based on the learning gained during microeconomics course, this paper analyses the current pricing strategies and norms practiced by the airline industry. Managerial Economics Term Paper Demand in the Domestic Airline Industry of India CONTENTS 1. INDUSTRY OVERVIEW ............................................................................................................................................... 3 1.1 MARKET SHARE ................................................................................................................................... 3 1.2 INDUSTRY GROWTH ............................................................................................................................ 4 1.3 CAPACITY VS DEMAND ........................................................................................................................ 5 2. AIRLINE INDUSTRY CUSTOMERS ............................................................................................................................... 5 2.1 CUSTOMER SEGMENTS ..............................................................................................................
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...Profits With Dynamic Pricing Please note that gray areas reflect artwork that has been intentionally removed. The substantive content of the article appears as originally published. REPRINT NUMBER 48415 pricing How to Reap Higher Profits With Dynamic Pricing S un Microsystems Inc. chairman Scott McNealy forecast that “With recent advances in wireless and information technology, even our cars could … call for bids whenever the fuel tank runs low, displaying a list of results from nearby gas stations right on the dashboard.”1 It sounds far-fetched. But dynamic pricing — where prices respond to supply and demand pressures in real time or near-real time — is making inroads in many different sectors, including apparel, automobiles, consumer electronics, personal services (such as haircuts), telecommunications and second-hand goods. The advent of the Internet led to cost transparency, decreased search costs and ease of price comparison. Some observers concluded that as a result, prices would decrease and equalize across different channels, and that fixed prices would continue to be the norm.2 However, price dispersion continues to be widespread and dynamic pricing is entering new sectors. EBay Inc. used auctions to sell more than $20 billion worth of goods in 2005. Ford Motor Co. sold more than $50 billion worth of automobiles in North America with demand-based DP in 2003, exceeding profit targets by $1 billion. Fixed prices are, after all...
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...MANAGERIAL ECONOMICS DRM 12 VBHA SURENDAR CHHAJED MANONMANIAM SUNDARNAR UNIVERSITY ENROLLMENT NO:A11QO5166003 1. Explain Balance of Payments in detail? Balance of payments (BoP) accounts are an accounting record of all monetary transactions between a country and the rest of the world. These transactions include payments for the country's exports and imports of goods, services, financial capital, and financial transfers. The BOP accounts summarize international transactions for a specific period, usually a year, and are prepared in a single currency, typically the domestic currency for the country concerned. Sources of funds for a nation, such as exports or the receipts of loans and investments, are recorded as positive or surplus items. Uses of funds, such as for imports or to invest in foreign countries, are recorded as negative or deficit items. A country's balance of payments is said to be in surplus (equivalently, the balance of payments is positive) by a certain amount if sources of funds (such as export goods sold and bonds sold) exceed uses of funds (such as paying for imported goods and paying for foreign bonds purchased) by that amount. There is said to be a balance of payments deficit (the balance of payments is said to be negative) if the former are less than the latter. The two principal parts of the BOP accounts are the currentaccount and the capital account. The current account shows the net amount a country is ...
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