Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER CHOICES IN SERVICE OUTSOURCING AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT(2016) Wang, Zuozheng; Dresner, Martin; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates customer behavior modeling in service outsourcing and revenue management in the service sector (i.e., airline and hotel industries). In particular, it focuses on a common theme of improving firms’ strategic decisions through the understanding of customer preferences. Decisions concerning degrees of outsourcing, such as firms’ capacity choices, are important to performance outcomes. These choices are especially important in high-customer-contact services (e.g., airline industry) because of the characteristics of services: simultaneity of consumption and production, and intangibility and perishability of the offering. Essay 1 estimates how outsourcing affects customer choices and market share in the airline industry, and consequently the revenue implications from outsourcing. However, outsourcing decisions are typically endogenous. A firm may choose whether to outsource or not based on what a firm expects to be the best outcome. Essay 2 contributes to the literature by proposing a structural model which could capture a firm’s profit-maximizing decision-making behavior in a market. This makes possible the prediction of consequences (i.e., performance outcomes) of future strategic moves. Another emerging area in service operations management is revenue management. Choice-based revenue systems incorporate discrete choice models into traditional revenue management algorithms. To successfully implement a choice-based revenue system, it is necessary to estimate customer preferences as a valid input to optimization algorithms. The third essay investigates how to estimate customer preferences when part of the market is consistently unobserved. This issue is especially prominent in choice-based revenue management systems. Normally a firm only has its own observed purchases, while those customers who purchase from competitors or do not make purchases are unobserved. Most current estimation procedures depend on unrealistic assumptions about customer arriving. This study proposes a new estimation methodology, which does not require any prior knowledge about the customer arrival process and allows for arbitrary demand distributions. Compared with previous methods, this model performs superior when the true demand is highly variable.Item The Impact of Airline and Customer Characteristics on Airline and Airport Choice(2012) Cho, Woohyun; Windle, Robert J; Dresner, Martin E; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The customer choice of a particular air flight is composed of two choice decisions in a multi airport region. The customer chooses the airline and the airport that best meets their needs. This dissertation is composed of two essays. The first essay examines the airline choice decision and the second essay investigates the airport choice decision. In the first essay the focus is the impact of airline operational quality among airline characteristics. This may include nonstop flight services, service frequency, on-time operations, etc. These factors contribute to the overall utility of airline service. Improvements in operational quality can lead to increases in reliability and convenience. As a result customers will choose airlines that offer higher levels of operational quality. Particularly, some customers are more sensitive to operational quality based on their unique characteristics and tend to have stronger preference for the airlines that provide higher levels of operational quality. This essay examines the following three issues; (1) the impact of operational quality on customer's choice of airline, (2) the moderating role of operations exposure (i.e., the extent to which customers are exposed to service operations) on customer choice, and (3) the moderating effect of customer characteristics on operational quality. The second essay looks at the impact of Low Cost Carrier (LCC) presence at airports and focuses on the following issues: (1) the impact of LCC presence on a route (after controlling for the impact of fares and service frequencies) on a customer's choice of airport, (2) the moderating effect of customer demographic characteristics on airline characteristics, and (3) the moderating role of the customer's geographical location on a customer's choice of airport. Both of these essays will utilize survey data collected from the customers departing from the three airports in the Washington Metropolitan Area. This data includes customers' choice of airline and airport along with extensive information on each customer including trip related information and demographic information.