題 目：Customer Differentiation with Shipping as an Ancillary Service? Free Service, Prioritization, and Strategic Delay
主講人： Arvind Sainathan 助理教授 (南洋理工大學商學院)
時 間：2017年12月19日 上午11:00
地 點：主樓317
主講人介紹：
Arvind Sainathan is an Assistant Professor in the Information Technology and Operations Management division at Nanyang Business School. His research interests primarily involve problems and issues in the interfaces of operations and marketing, particularly considering how pricing – under different contexts involving supply chain management, service management, and sustainable operations – influences and/or is impacted by operational decisions. His research has been published in MSOM, POM, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, and International Journal of Production Economics. He obtained his PhD from Simon Business School at the University of Rochester in the United States.
內容介紹：
A service provider/retailer offers ancillary service (e.g. shipping by an online retailer) to two types of customers, impatient and patient, who may be heterogeneous both in their delay sensitivities and service valuations. She can use prioritization and/or strategic delay to differentiate them by offering two service classes and charging different prices, potentially resulting in a split in which a single customer type selects both the classes. Her objective is to minimize cost while satisfying individual rationality and incentive compatibility conditions. We characterize the optimal solutions under both exogenous and endogenous capacities. We examine the conditions under which the following strategically important features of service delivery are optimal, and relate them to practical scenarios: (i) free service, (ii) single/differentiated service, (iii) split of customers, and (iv) strategic delay. We find that the presence of these features depends on (i) whether the retailer has limited or sufficient capacity and (ii) whether she sells fashion goods or staple products. A typical explanation for offering free service is that it increases demand from customers. We make an operational case for it by showing that even if demand does not change, free service is still optimal under some scenarios.
（承辦：管理科學與物流系，科研與學術交流中心）
