We investigate the firm's dynamic nonlinear pricing problem when facing consumers whose tastes vary according to a scalar index. We relax the standard assumption that the firm knows the distribution of this index. In general the firm should determine its marginal price schedule as if it were...

Decision analysts commonly use low-order discrete approximation of probability distributions to reduce computational effort. We have found that three popular discretization methods can lead to serious errors in certain applications, among them, news vendor problem and scheduling decisions for...

Providing the right staffing levels is of paramount importance in most service centers. Excess capacity is costly, yet a lack of sufficient capacity leads to unacceptably low service levels which may be even costlier. When determining staffing levels for a service center it is, therefore,...

In evaluating new product opportunities through the use of a rating scheme, account must be taken of the fact that the individual factors on which the product is being assessed interact in producing an overall result. A score for a product may be thought of as a point in n dimensional space in...

Rapid technological developments and deregulation of the telecommunications industry have changed the way in which content providers distribute and price their goods and services. Instead of selling a bundle of content and access through proprietary networks, these firms are shifting their...

The optimal coupon schedule for municipal bonds with limits on the number of distinct coupons is formulated in terms of two different dynamic programming models which, in contrast to the companion paper, do guarantee an optimal solution, although at the cost of additional computational difficulty.

There is strong evidence that consumers learn from their brand consumption experiences and continuously update their brand purchase probabilities. However, in explaining why established competitive brands continuously compete through periodic price promotions, most of the existing theories do...