【Speaker】Qing Ding, Assistant Professor, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University

【Topic】Dynamic Pricing for Hotels Considering Multiple-Day Stays

【Time】13:00 – 15:00, 2010-04-12, Monday

【Venue】ROOM 453, Weilun Building, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】English

【Organizer】Research Center of Contemporary Management, Tsinghua University

Department of Management Science and Engineering, Tsinghua SEM

Abstract

We study the optimal pricing policy for hotels with a single type of rooms when the arrival of customer requests is stochastic and nonstationary. Customers may make reservations for multiple-day stays and this feature is taken into account when we determine the rental rates. We formulate this problem as a stochastic dynamic program. Both analytical and computational results suggest that one should raise the rental rate for high-demand days and lower the rental rate for their neighboring, low-demand days so that the revenue is maximized. For large size problems we develop two heuristics that determine the rental rates almost instantly when a customer makes a request.

Speaker

Dr. Qing Ding is Assistant Professor of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University. His principle research interests are in Global Supply Chain Management, Dynamic Revenue Management, Applications of Auction Theory, and Production Scheduling. He has published articles in Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, IIE Transactions, European Journal of Operations Research and other high quality academic journals. He received his Bachelor and Master degree in Control Theory from Nankai University in China. He received a Ph. D degree in Operations Research from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a Ph.D. degree in Operations Management from Washington University at St. Louis.