Optimal pricing policies for perishable products

In many industrial settings, managers face the problem of establishing a pricing policy that maximises the revenue from selling a given inventory of items by a fixed deadline, with the full inventory of items being available for sale from the beginning of the selling period. This problem arises in a variety of industries, including the sale of fashion garments, flight seats, and hotel rooms. We present a family of continuous pricing functions for which the optimal pricing strategy can be explicitly characterised and easily implemented. These pricing functions are the basis for a general pricing methodology which is particularly well suited for application in the context of an increasing role for the Internet as a means to market goods and services. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.