题目：Trade-in for Cash or for Upgrade? Dynamic Pricing with Customer Choice

时间：1月6日 14:30

地点：经济与管理学院学术报告厅（南校区信远楼2区327）

报告人：肖勇波 副教授

Abstract: Trade-in programs for electronics products, e.g., smartphones, have been increasingly popular. These programs target at customers who seek to salvage or upgrade their old devices (we call them ``bargainers"). There are two widely adopted trade-in schemes: trade-in-for-upgrade and trade-in-for-cash. In this paper, we consider a manufacturer who offers both trade-in schemes (i.e., a hybrid trade-in program) to acquire old products, then refurbish and resell them, together with the new product. The bargainers choose which scheme to trade in their products while the new customers decide whether to buy a new product or a refurbished one. The firm dynamically sets the trade-in prices and the resale price of refurbished product so as to maximize its expected total profit over a finite selling season. We derive the optimal trade-in prices and resale price of refurbished product and the corresponding optimal trade-in and resale strategies under both {\em exogenous} and {\em endogenous} new product selling price cases. In particular, when the new product price is exogenously given, we show that the optimal trade-in and resale policies are of a threshold type and the optimal resale price of refurbished product and the optimal trade-in refunds are decreasing in the inventory level of refurbished product. When the new product price is endogenously determined, it is optimal for the manufacturer to set it at a constant during the entire season while adjusting the trade-in and resale prices over time, regardless of the refurbished product's inventory level. Our  numerical results further show that the hybrid trade-in program could generate significantly more profit than either upgrade-only or cash-only trade-in program; and if only one trade-in scheme is offered, cash-only program performs better than upgrade-only program when the selling price of new product is low, depreciation of old product is fast, and the proportion of bargainers is relatively small.

Yongbo Xiao is an Associate Professor (with tenure) at School of Economicsand Management, Tsinghua University, China. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. inManagement Science and Engineering in 2006, and B.E. in Management InformationSystems in 2000, all from Tsinghua University. He joined Tsinghua SEM as anassistant professor in Aug. 2008 after he completed his postdoctoral researchin Department of Economics in Tsinghua SEM. He was awarded the “Science Fundfor Excellent Young Scholar” under National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC) in 2012 and the “Young Scholar Award of Chinese Management Science” in2014. He was elected as a Chang Jiang scholar in 2016.

Dr. Xiao’s research interests include revenue and pricing management, servicemanagement, supply chain management, and healthcare management. Dr. Xiao haspublished over 30 papers in the refereed international and domestic journals inthe area of operations research and management science, such as Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, Omega:The International Journal of Management Science, IIE Transactions, Computersand Operations Research, and InternationalJournal of Production Economics.