Benny Mantin will hold his inaugural lecture on 23rd October 2018.
Price is the single most important factor in the interaction between firms and their consumers: when price goes up, demand usually decreases, and vice versa. However, as firms increasingly adopt dynamic pricing and revenue management practices, the price consumers encounter tends to exhibit varying degrees of volatility. Recognizing the opportunity of a future discount, sophisticated consumers may be willing to delay their purchase in expectation of a price drop while facing the risk of a price increase or a product stock-out.
Accordingly, the interaction between firms and consumers evolves and become increasingly more complex. This is compounded by the emergence of decision support tools that leverage the availability of data to provide consumers with fare predictions. This feeds back into firms’ pricing decisions as well as their stocking choices.
This lecture outlines the recent history of interaction between firms and consumers, taking the airline industry – an avant-garde in adopting revenue management mechanisms – as a leading example, considering predictability of fares, consumer responses, their impact on fares and revenues, and the integration back into revenue management models, while shedding light on inventory decisions.
Benny Mantin is professor and the Director of the Luxembourg Centre of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL), at the University of Luxembourg, which is a member of the MIT’s SCALE Network.
His research, which covers different aspects of dynamic pricing and revenue management, supply chain management, and transportation economics, has been published in leading journals such as Marketing Science and Production and Operations Management.
Prof. Mantin is a board member of the Journal of Air Transport Management and the European Aviation Conference, among others, and he has been engaged in consulting on air-transport policies. He was a visiting scholar at multiple institutions and held the Jean-Jacques Laffont Digital Chair on Digital Economy (at TSE).
Prior to joining the LCL, Prof. Mantin was an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Introduction by Prof. Katalin Ligeti, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance. A reception will be held after the lecture.