Risk-averse decision making in overbooking problem

Abstract

Traditional literature studying overbooking problems focuses on risk-neutral decision makers. In this paper, we propose a multi-period overbooking model incorporating risk-aversion and extend well-known structural results (the 3-region policy) under the risk-neutral case to the risk-averse one on the basis of an exponential utility function. We also show that the optimal policy for the risk-neutral decision maker can be obtained by letting the risk-aversion parameter approach to zero under the risk-averse case. Therefore, the extant results under the risk-neutral case can be interpreted as a special case of ours. We also investigate how the optimal policy changes with some cost parameters and the decision maker's degree of risk-aversion. Numerical results suggest that the optimal bounds in the 3-region policy may increase or decrease with the decision maker's degree of risk-aversion.

Keywords:

• revenue management
• risk-averse
• overbooking
• marketing
• inventory

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by NSFC Projects 70971072 and 71031005.