| Summary: | 博士 === 國立交通大學 === 工業工程與管理系所 === 106 === This research proposes a multi-year membership pricing policy for a service business like a gym chain. In the pricing policy, the equivalent membership price per year is relatively low to attract customers and the multi-year membership fees must be prepaid in full. The prepaid cash provides resources for scale expansion by opening new stores. Based on a forecast demand function, we first propose a nonlinear mathematical programming model for the gym chain to make an optimal pricing decision (p*, y*), where p* is the equivalent annual fee for using gym service over y* year). Then we make a risk analysis on this pricing strategy in case the realized demand is different from the forecast demand due to unexpected reasons.
According to numerical experiments, we have the following two findings. Firstly, if the realized demand is exactly the same as the forecast demand, the multi-year membership pricing policy is substantially better than the business-as-usual pricing policy (one-year membership) in cash balance, profit, and market share. Secondly, if the realized demand declines much faster than the forecast demand, the gym chain shall experience a “peak-and-down” journey. The gym chain appears quite successful in the early stage but finally may turn to become bankrupt. The “peak-and-down” numerical finding is empirically supported by a real world case in Taiwan.
|
|---|
