Open Pricing Research Articles

Security and Trust in Online Booking Systems: A Comparative Analysis Of Tour and Travel Websites

The Tour and Travel sector have undergone a transformative shift with the proliferation of online reservation platforms, redefining how individuals plan and secure their travel arrangements. This study critically examines the pivotal aspects of security and trust within the digital landscape of tour and travel websites, aiming to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis.In our increasingly digitised age, the security of sensitive financial and personal data is of utmost importance. Our investigation begins with a thorough analysis of the security precautions taken by a wide-ranging sample of tour and travel websites. The effectiveness of user authentication, data protection protections, and conformance with industry standards are some of the key areas under evaluation. This analysis reveals considerable discrepancies in how these security protocols are applied, potentially exposing weaknesses in particular systems. The foundation of the internet booking procedure is trust, as well. This study evaluates a variety of elements, such as user reviews, website design, pricing transparency, and timeliness of customer support, when evaluating trust-building strategies. The study draws attention to the varying approaches taken by various websites to build trust, which has a big impact on how confident customers are in the booking process. This research explores the practical repercussions of security breaches and trust deficiencies, combining real-world case studies and user input, in addition to security and trust evaluation. These results highlight how these elements have a significant influence on consumer behaviour and brand reputation. This comparison analysis highlights the critical requirement for uniform and strong security safeguards across all online booking systems, to sum up. At the same time, it highlights how crucial it is to create trust-enhancing strategies like open pricing and attentive customer care. This research is a useful resource for industry stakeholders, regulatory agencies, and consumers in an era where digital travel planning and booking predominates, enabling informed decision-making and supporting a safe and reliable online booking environment. Additionally, a key element affecting customer choices during the online booking process is trust. This study considers factors including user reviews, website design, pricing transparency, and customer service responsiveness to gauge trustworthiness. It becomes clear that different websites employ quite different trust-building techniques, which has an effect on users' faith in the reservation process.

Análisis del impacto de Open Pricing dinámico en el Revenue Management Hotelero

The introduction of big data technology into hotel revenue management (RM) systems has paved a new way to fix the price in the hospitality industry called 'open pricing' (OP). This study discusses the dynamic pricing evolution of hotels and examines the concept of OP. This pricing system manages a great amount of data and consists primarily of sophisticated real-time price discrimination with no rate ranges and fences, based on the customer's willingness to pay. This study investigates whether OP implementation increases independent hotels' performance. Three case studies were conducted using the analysis of variance test to compare three years of data on three independent hotels after applying OP. The selected hotels' performance in time trends with the competitors' data collected from STR was also compared using a t-test. This study provides empirical evidence that OP improves the occupancy rate, average daily rate, and revenue per available room, justifying the use of OP in RM systems of independent hotels. This study helps advance our understanding of the OP concept; it is one of the few empirical studies to analyse the impact of OP on hotel performance.

The wheel of dynamic pricing: Towards open pricing and one to one pricing in hotel revenue management

Dynamic pricing is at the core of hotel revenue management (RM). Big data technologies have facilitated information processing and enriched dynamic pricing techniques. One of the challenges in the sector relates to price personalization, i.e., how prices can be adjusted at the customer level. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyzes how dynamic pricing is currently implemented in hotel RM. By doing so, this research shows empirical evidence of the use of recent concepts in the industry like “open pricing” and identifies the opportunities and challenges of a customer-centric approach to pricing. From a theoretical perspective, the study may guide future research on pricing in hotel RM. Finally, this work also presents actionable insights for practitioners.

The impact of pharmaceutical marketing on market access, treatment coverage, pricing, and social welfare.

Pharmaceutical spending in the United States, Canada, and the EU is growing. Public payers cover a large portion of these costs and have responded by instituting various pricing and access policies to limit their expenditure. One challenge that public payers face is additional demand induced by a manufacturer's marketing effort. We use a game theoretic approach to study the impact of pharmaceutical marketing on six practical pricing and access policies: negotiated pricing, open pricing, controlled pricing, a listing process, a risk-sharing arrangement, and a value-based pricing with risk-sharing arrangement. We find that all non-value-based policies result in either restricted access or suboptimal treatment coverage. We find that marketing is the highest in the first-best setting where all decisions are made by a social planner. We also find that the value-based pricing with risk-sharing arrangement is preferred by the manufacturer and from a societal perspective whereas no policy is universally preferred by a health care payer. A value-based pricing with risk-sharing arrangement always results in zero net monetary benefit for a health care payer. Therefore, considering non-value-based arrangements, we find that a negotiated pricing policy, a controlled pricing policy, or a risk-sharing arrangement may be socially preferred.

Credit Risk Transfer, Informed Markets, and Securitization

Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) funded the U.S. housing bubble, while the ensuing bust resulted in systemic risk and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In the run-up to the crisis, MBS pricing failed to reveal the growing credit risk. This article draws lessons from this failure that could inform the use of credit risk transfers (CRTs) to price credit risk. The author concludes that the CRT market, as currently constituted, could have appropriately priced and revealed credit risk during the bubble years because it met three key requirements: 1) transparency, through the full provision of information on the mortgages underlying the CRTs and the standardization of mortgages that arose from the predominance of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae in the mortgage market; 2) open pricing in liquid markets; and 3) no counterparty risk. The author also describes areas of GSE reform that could either impair or enhance the ability of the CRT market to limit credit risk going forward, including the possible presence of multiple guarantors and the use of a common securitization platform.

Web-based marketing: The coming revolution in marketing thought and strategy

The web is growing at a dramatic pace and is significantly impacting customer and business market behaviors. As a result, most firms have started developing marketing strategies for the web. In this paper, we propose that the web is fundamentally changing, and will continue to change, marketing thought and practice. The paper suggests that the web-based markets of tomorrow may have little resemblance to the markets of today. We discuss the emergence of reverse marketing, customer-centric marketing, effective-efficiency, adaptation, expectation management, marketing process focus and fixed cost marketing in the context of marketing theory and practice. In addition, we discuss customer behaviors such as cocreation, universal availability, use of infomediaries, temporal shifts, open pricing and a move toward bricks to clicks.

German open access and transmission pricing within the European framework

The author examines Germany's open access and transmission pricing policy within the European electricity supply framework and explains how the German government's main reasons for letting market participants jointly define the rules for network access are consistency and flexibility.

99/03225 Use of system approaches for transmission open access pricing

99/03225 Use of system approaches for transmission open access pricing

Trade Liberalization and the Behavior of Emerging Stock Market Prices

The subject of this paper is to examine the effect of trade liberalization on the behavior of real emerging stock market prices. The paper first explores the theoretical link between trade liberalization and real stock price behavior by developing an open economy asset pricing model with production. Using this model we develop three regimes of trade liberalization: (I) no liberalization, where there is a fixed quota on the level of imported inputs; (ii) partial liberalization, where the home country's government allows the level of imports to grow up to a threshold; (iii) full liberalization where the quantity constraint on the imported intermediate inputs is removed. The predictions of the model are that real equity returns show negative serial correlation in the first regime, positive autocorrelation in the second regime and zero serial correlation or no predictability in the third regime. In the paper, we then test to determine if the stock price behavior predictions from the theory are confirmed by actual real stock price data from 25 emerging market countries. Employing return autocorrelation and variance ratio tests we find that there is a distinct change in the serial correlation property of the returns as these countries have liberalized the trade sector. Emerging market real stock prices tend to obey the random walk property after these countries liberalized, while real returns show significant positive autocorrelation during the period when these countries were relatively closed.

A Futures Market Response to Oil Price Volatility

The volatility of oil prices has expanded dramatically over the past twenty years. New mechanisms, including futures and forward contracts, options on futures and “over-the-counter” options have been developed to deal with the uncertainty of buying or selling of petroleum in the highly competitive markets that now characterize the oil situation. Futures contracts — agreements to buy or sell oil at a particular time in the future — are the core of the new mechanisms. Since futures market prices move in concert with cash (“wet”) market prices, futures can be an effective substitute for wet barrel transactions. Buyers of options gain the advantage of futures trading — the right to buy without the obligation to do so — for a fee. Futures markets provide open pricing, not subject to special, hidden arrangements. Contracts are available for crude oil, heating oil, gasoline, propane and natural gas. All contract terms are fixed so that only price need be negotiated. This is how so many contracts are traded rapidly. Financial institutions are learning that futures, when used in a competent hedge program, provide safety and allow for business expansion.

Open Pricing Agreements and the Dissemination of Data under the Combines Investigation Act

Attempts to enforce the prohibition against price fixing in the Combines Investiga tion Act have resulted in confusion regarding the distinction between actual price fixing agreements, open pricing agreements and data dissemination agreements. This confusion arises due to the similarity in the motivation for entering into the three types of agreements and in the consequences of the agreements. The author considers the legality and the ramifications for competition policy of agreements facilitative of open pricing. Most open pricing agreements are probably illegal under the Combines Investigation Act, Mr. Nozick concludes, and almost all such agree ments are harmful and should be prohibited. Data dissemination agreements, while probably not illegal, have anti-competitive effects, and accordingly should be regulated.

The Law of Open Pricing in the United States and Britain— A Comparative Analysis

THE object of the statutory body of antitrust law in the United States is to protect as such. The British Restrictive Trade Practices Act, on the other hand, nowhere mentions the word competition in describing what agreements come within the Act'; the British Act seeks rather to effect the registration of agreements and arrangements entered into by competitors and then to determine on a discretionary and ad hoc basis whether such agreements or arrangements are against the public interest. Despite this rather large difference in the British and American approaches to combinations in restraint of trade, there is at least one area in which their courts are faced with an identical problem: the root problem of determining whether there in fact is an arrangement among or combination of competitors in existence.2 This problem has become acute in Britain with regard to open or information agreements, whereby sellers in the same market exchange pricing and perhaps other statistical data through the medium of a trade association.