| As an important part of tourism industry and an industry closely related to people’s life,airline industry has witnessed unprecedented development in the past decades.However,the further development of the industry has always been restricted by the problems of high cost,uncertain demand and capacity constraints.Unpredictable weather conditions and unexpected events reinforce the uncertainty of demand.In order to improve the matching degree of supply and demand in the airline industry and thus improve the profits of airlines,selling strategies such as advance selling,discount selling,group buying and overbooking have been widely used in the airline industry.The lack of demand caused by COVID-19 made these strategies obsolete.How to develop new selling strategies to get airlines out of trouble has always been a concern of decision makers.In recent years,due to the rapid development of the Internet,the digitization of information products and the digitization of information attributes of non-information products,information integration has been realized in industrial production and marketing,and some new selling strategies have gradually surfaced.Based on this,we study two strategies of flight crowdfunding and opaque selling in order to further explore and integrate airline resources and improve the matching degree between supply and demand,which has important theoretical and practical significance.The main research contents and relevant conclusions of this dissertation are showed from the following aspects:First,the third chapter studies the pricing and product design strategies of airlines based on crowdfunding.This chapter analyzes a novel selling strategy for airlines,termed flight crowdfunding,whereby an airline,as a creator,launches flights to solicit funds from the crowd.Under this strategy,the project succeeds if the total amount pledged reaches a predetermined threshold by the end of the campaign;otherwise,the flight will be cancelled.We provide an implementable model to describe the process of flight crowdfunding and explain the behavior of strategic consumers.First,we find that crowdfunding is strictly optimal for airlines in a competitive market,although perhaps not in a monopoly market.Crowdfunding benefits airlines by reducing their expected cost and introducing a new type of buyer uncertainty,that is,uncertainty in the projects’success probability.Second,we show that the optimal threshold is lower than the indifferent point.Third,a counterintuitive finding is that crowdfunding may increase the equilibrium price in a monopoly market.Our research underscores the importance of crowdfunding and shows that crowdfunding may be even more attractive than what was previously thought.Crowdfunding can also improve airlines’ profits as a revenue management strategy and benefit social welfare by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Second,Chapter 4 studies the cooperation mechanism between airlines and OTA based on crowdfunding.This chapter proposes a micro-foundation to analyse consumers’purchase behaviour,the interaction between airlines and the OTAs for launching crowdfunding flights and design contracts to coordinate the supply chain.We find that airlines tend to reduce the participation threshold below the break-even point to attract more consumers even if doing so will lead to losses when the demand is insufficient.We also examine the conditions under which crowdfunding exists and find that crowdfunding exists only if the regular flight price gradient and consumers risk sensitivity coefficient are large enough and if the unit cost is small enough.A counterintuitive finding is that the crowdfunding price deceases,rather than increases,along with unit cost.We also explore the supply chain coordination with contracts and prove that the wholesale-price and revenue-sharing contracts cannot coordinate the supply chain,which contrasts the findings of most classic literature.We also propose and prove that the cost-sharing contract can achieve supply chain coordination and reach its optimal performance.Our findings underscore the importance of crowdfunding:not only for raising funds for enterprises but also for improving their profits by deceasing the expected costs.Third,Chapter 5 studies airlines’product pricing and capacity allocation strategy based on opaque selling.This chapter studies pricing and availability problems in opaque selling in the travel industry,whereby sellers hidden some exact identities of the products and consumers do not know them until they make payments.Products in the travel industry are often perishable and face the uncertainty of demand.Accordingly,our work combines availability management and opaque selling in solving the supply and demand mismatch problem.We provide an implementable model to describe the opaque selling and explain the behavior of strategic consumers.Airlines may experience the prisoners’ dilemma when distributing products through an intermediary,which reduces airlines’ profits and benefits the intermediary.As such,we propose an alliance policy to eliminate the prisoners’ dilemma.Results show that this policy can improve the profits of airlines and the supply chain if the commission rate is adequately low.Our findings suggest that opaque selling is less beneficial than previously shown and demonstrate the importance of the alliance policy.Our study expands the related literature on the subject and enriches existing theories in availability management and opaque selling.Fourth,Chapter 6 studies the impact of consumer psychology on airlines’ pricing strategy based on opaque selling.In opaque selling,consumers only learn some hidden information about the product after the payment.Consumers will have expectations when they get preferred products,otherwise they may have regrets.We consider two types of consumers,namely leisure consumers dominated by expectation and business consumers dominated by regret.We found that the type of consumer directly affects the opaque product price and profit of airlines.At the same time,we explore what happens when airlines ignore consumer psychology and find that they consistently overestimate their own profits.In this study,consumer psychology is took into consideration in the decision-making of opaque selling,which is more practical and further enriches the theory and research of opaque selling.The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows:(1)we propose a selling strategy to increase airlines’expected profits by reducing airlines’ expected costs rather than increasing airlines’ expected revenues,namely flight crowdfunding;(2)in the cooperation between airlines and OTA to launch the flight crowdfunding activity,a contract that can coordinate the supply chain is proposed,namely,the cost-sharing contract;(3)we find that in opaque selling with capacity allocation problems,airlines may experience the prisoner’s dilemma,which can be eliminated by the alliance strategy;(4)we introduce consumer psychology into opaque selling,and point out that airlines always overestimate their profits when ignoring consumer psychology. |
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