Customer Reviews

Pricing and Revenue Optimization

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pricing and Revenue Optimization fills the need for a rigorous yet accessible introduction to the field more commonly known as revenue management. The author presents key pricing decisions such as airline revenue management, markdown management, and customized pricing as constrained optimization problems. It is the only broadly accessible consistent treatment of these topics in one place. The intended audience is MBA and MS level students and managers with solid quantitative backgrounds. Linear programming, probabilistic modeling, and some calculus is used. This book neatly fills the space between the popular treatment in Cross's "Revenue Management" and the much more mathematical "Theory and Practice of Revenue Management" by Talluri and van Ryzin. The book is well written and presents plenty of real-world grounding as well as the necessary mathematics. It is written as a textbook but would also serve for any quantitatively-oriented analyst or manager wanting to know how math models can be used to improve pricing. As a textbook, it is a little short of problems and I would have liked to see chapters on forecasting and price-response estimation. It is the best available introduction to this important topic for the MBA-level student or practitioner.

The author has written this book very well in terms of content,quality and organization. However, he could have added some enhanced topics. For example, how to segment the market into n optimal segments rather than just 2 segments. Unlike other titles, this book has sufficient mathematical treatment of the subject. The book is must for college graduates and professionals who wants to learn the subject of PRO. Finally, it is five star book.

The primary focus are the pricing issues of service providers. There is 1 chapter dealing with retailers and 1 chapter dealing with bidding on contracts. The pricing issues of manufacturers and wholesalers are largely ignored.

OK, I am like you, I heard about the concepts, but I am not touch with academics anymore. I was a math undergrad, I have an MS in engineering and a Wharton MBA, but that was a long time ago. I do remember pricing elasticity concepts, but I have not found such a fascinating topic in a long time. Bob Phillips is doing a fantastic job educating the reader to a complex and theoretical field, yet you will ALL find applications in your industry.

I urge you to read the book, and start applying the concepts immediately to your industry. I expect applications way beyond the obvious airline and banking industries. Please learn about PRO (price revenue optimization), and yield management.

I'm still reading, but what I found is a book with good bases in theory and excellent quantitative analyses.

One of the best tool I have read about RM, with a great organization of each topic.

This is an excellent book and should be in every pricing professionals library. The only critisism I could make is that the author should be very explicit with the examples and walk the reader through the techniques used in detail.