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a lot of my research deals with dynamic pricing and how consumers respond to prices and particularly we look at data
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from firms data from nonprofits to understand how we can adjust prices over time or zones over products and make the
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pricing policies palatable better for consumers improve consumer welfare and also make the form better and this is a
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tricky operational problem there is a marketing facet to it which is how people respond to this kind of price
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changes and price adjustments and a lot of my research has been trying to understand the interface of these two
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issues and trying to connect them we have a couple of papers that I will talk about one of the papers we look at
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data from a nonprofit enterprise this is one of the most reputed symphony orchestras in the country and the
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industry faces a lot of challenges it's a non-profit so one of our objectives is
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to make them healthier than they are right now and since they treat their patrons that's how they treat us
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consumers our patrons for them they are the source of their well-being and and therefore one of the things that we
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looked at is how you can start thinking about adjusting prices so that not only you do better revenue wise but also help
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get more consumers more patrons into the theater improve the experience that the
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consumers have in when they go to a concert so I go to a concert if it's 80%
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full I'm happy if it's 50% full even at the same prices I'm less happy so how do
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you improve consumer utility in terms of how they feel the perception that they have after the concert and how willing
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they are to go to the concert repeatedly based on the experience that they have so this was more of the focus that we
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had and we found out one of the things that really mattered was the history of prices where you start matters how do
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you move prices up or down matters and for which concerts you move down versus fist constants you move up this matters
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a lot where people are seated this matters so we have static pricing problem we have dynamic pricing problem
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we have product variety problem and all of these are very intricate operational problems that we have to solve together
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to make it better for the phone the second problem that we have been looking at is data from major league sports team
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in the United States which is a completely different context if you think about it here
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smarter popularity matters profits model the players well-being matters fans well-being matters but there are many
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many similarities again the issues that we found was static pricing very start how do you adjust prices this matters
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how do you price games how do you price games based on opponents can you fill the stadium can this improve welfare all
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of this ends up being very important at the end so to come back the collective focus of our problem is to understand
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how operations how marketing of pricing matters together and how we can improve both the firm and the consumer all
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a couple of things one of the things that is often discussed in um in the in the real world is how consumers respond
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to prices there's a lot of controversy about whether people find it favorable
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whether people hate it and and whether it's a right practice to do one of the
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things that we found out was that firms do want to understand this battle and they already have tools to do this
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battle and the worry is about perception of the consumers and what we found from
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our data is a lot of consumers do understand why firms have to adjust prices why firms have the increase or
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decrease prices based on popular concerts or less popular concerts for example they don't mind paying slightly
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higher prices if they had much better experience so it is always a question about how you can improve the experience
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from the product utility from the product and whether consumers are much better off even with a slight price
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increase and that's really something that drives a lot of our results so we found that interesting that consumers
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respond positively to price adjustments at the same time the worry is there and we have to do
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this carefully and calibrate it very well that's also important one of the things that uh that makes
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firms a little bit worried about getting jumping into dynamic programming dynamic
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pricing is to is the following buddy one they're always unsure whether consumer
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response to price adjustments are going to be extreme and therefore that makes it firms very of trying various things
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what has happened our in the recent years is with the help of mobile devices and experimental improvements and things
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like that we can do a lot of testing but it becomes very important in the following sense we cannot test forever
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we have to do a careful study of what kind of policies we can test for and much of the testing happens in sequence
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so one of the things that we found out was a firm that we looked at wanted to change its pricing policy this team and
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they were setting different price policies over time and as they were changing policies they had to also
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understand how consumers are responding to different policies and we were able to tease of them and tease out a
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methodology that can tell them hey this policy cost the consumers to come more often
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this policy changed how they choose between different seats the certain policy that we tested for based on the
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number of days out to the game changed how far ahead of the game or how close to the game they buy tickets so every
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policy we could test out what kind of changes it created in terms of how consumers bought products and that helps
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us to go back and say if a firm wants to focus on a particular question let's say
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I don't mind my revenues being flat but I want consumers to buy the same product
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maybe five days I can we do that and we can look at policies that we can explore
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so this being able to experiment test policies and being able to study and calibrate them helps us to understand
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what kind of behaviors what kind of changes we can we can do so classically if you think about an
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Operations research problem we would treat it as an optimization problem we would just say hey here is the demand
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here's the demand curve here is a product set of products that you have let's just go on optimize this is great
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this is challenging this is mathematically very beautiful but what we want to also think about is any
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optimization you do within your firm is going to affect people it's going to
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it's going to change how people respond how people behave and the overwhelming
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goal or the trajectory of my research focus has been on understanding these are people making decisions it's
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important to their lives it's important to the experience it's important to
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their utilities we have to integrate how they behave how they change their decisions into our optimization problems
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so now we have a more intricate operational problem there we are just things constantly but we also wonder how
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it changes people's decisions responses and again you integrate that back into
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your optimization problem this makes the problem challenging complicated harder but much more enjoyable and much more
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relevant to the community there are many challenges there's all these very different ways how consumers
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behave there is always phones that are looking for different data one of the one of the
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challenges that we have is we know very very little about how optimally we can price products how dynamically we can
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price products for various settings it's always challenging it's always constantly changing we can think of
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pricing tickets for a hockey team that's completely different from search pricing
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as uber or love to do how do consumers respond and call taxis when you change prices that's a completely different
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setting from thinking about how do you change pink prices when you ship from one part of the country to some other
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part of the country all of them have the same theoretical flavor but very different applications in each of these
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applications consumer responses quite diverse quite different so the challenge is there to take all this research and
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theory that we are knowing every minute every day and make it more applicable and that's part of what I want to do and
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that's part of what we have been doing at what along with my marketing colleagues here great doctoral students
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so this is this is one of the goals I have you