| The efficiency of revenue management relies on the effectiveness of the strategies it employs. In the competing market nowadays, time has become an important concern at both demand and supply sides. With time-sensitive customers and additional benefits from intertemporal demand shift, we find that the sellers could turn to a time-differentiation based strategy as an effective revenue management tool. Motivated by real-life business issues of Toyota China dealerships, in this thesis, we consider stylized inventory-control models with delivery upgrades, in which the seller allocates its on-hand inventory to price and delivery-time sensitive customers. The seller provides two delivery-time options with different prices. Customers choose the proper purchasing option according to their heterogeneous preferences. The seller has two decisions: inventory commitment and inventory replenishment. The former addresses, within an inventory cycle, how on-hand inventories are allocated between the two classes of customers. The latter addresses, between inventory cycles, how the inventory is replenished. Furthermore, the seller may employ early delivery, namely upgrade, to achieve a higher inventory flexibility. We develop the optimal inventory allocation and upgrade, and inventory replenishment policies, and demonstrate that the optimal control can be characterized by a switching curve. Based on the basic model setting, we extend our analysis to include cases of upgrade cost, stock-out substitution, and capacity constraint. We further discuss the joint pricing and inventory decision. We obtain the form of the optimal joint policy, and show that the two strategies may well complement each other in our setting. When each is applied separately, their performances are also compared. To shed more light on the practical side, finally, we use the Toyota dealership data to calibrate the required parameters, and demonstrate the potential of the optimal inventory allocation and upgrade control. |
