运营管理系学术报告:Trade-in for Cash or for Upgrade? Dynamic Pricing with Customer Choice


时间:10月29日 10:00-11:30


地点:商学院武东路校区106


摘要:Trade-in programs for electronics products, e.g., mobile phones, have been increasingly popular. These programs target at customers (we call them "bargainers") who seek to salvage or upgrade their old devices. There are two widely adopted trade-in options: trade-in-for-upgrade and trade-in-for-cash. In this paper, we consider a firm who offers both trade-in options, i.e., a hybrid trade-in program, to acquire old products, then refurbishes and resells them, together with  new product over a finite selling horizon. The bargainers choose which option to trade in their products while new customers decide whether to buy a new product or a refurbished one. When the selling price of new products is exogenous, we derive the optimal trade-in prices of old product and resale price of refurbished product. We show that the optimal trade-in and resale policies are of a threshold-type and trade-in-for-upgrade should be offered with a premium refund (compared to trade-in-for-cash) only in early periods of the selling horizon. We further consider two variants of the base model. In the first, the new product has a fixed amount of initial inventory and is not replenishable during the selling horizon. One different finding is that the firm may still offer a premium refund for trade-in-for-upgrade in the later periods of the selling horizon. In the second, the firm also sets the new product price. We show that when the customer sensitivity of product quality follows a uniform distribution, it is optimal for the firm to set the new product price at a constant level during the entire horizon, regardless of the refurbished product's inventory level. Finally, our  numerical results demonstrate that the hybrid trade-in program could generate significantly more profit than either upgrade-only or cash-only trade-in program. (This is a joint work with Sean X. Zhou.)


演讲者简介:Yongbo Xiao is a Professor (with tenure) at School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, China. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Management Science and Engineering in 2006, and B.E. in Management Information Systems in 2000, all from Tsinghua University. He was awarded the “Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholar” under National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2012 and the “Young Scholar Award of Chinese Management Science” in 2014. He was elected as a Chang Jiang Scholar in 2015. Dr. Xiao’s research interests include revenue and pricing management, service management, supply chain management, and healthcare management. Dr. Xiao has published over 40 papers in the refereed international and domestic journals in the area of operations research and management science, such as Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, and IIE Transactions. He serves as Managing Editor at "Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering".


肖勇波,清华大学经济管理学院管理科学与工程系教授。2000年获清华大学管理信息系统学士学位,2006年获清华大学管理科学与工程硕士和博士学位。目前兼任清华大学现代管理研究中心主任助理和兼职研究员,担任国际学术期刊《Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering》的Managing Editor国家自然科学基金优秀青年基金(2012)和中国管理学青年奖(2014)的获得者。主要研究领域包括收益与定价管理、供应链管理、服务管理等;学术论文发表于《Production and Operations Management》、《Decision Sciences》、《Naval Research Logistics》、《IIE Transactions》等国际学术期刊。