Joint product variety, pricing and scheduling decisions in a flexible facility
研究制造商在柔性生产设施中，面对顾客对产品质量边际估值存在私人信息时，如何联合优化产品种类、定价和详细生产调度（批次大小和顺序），以实现二级价格歧视和规模经济。
This paper studies a manufacturer’s optimal product variety, pricing and scheduling decisions in a single flexible production facility when customers have private information in their marginal valuations for product qualities. In addition to determining the product variety and price of each product, the manufacturer needs to optimise a detailed schedule of production (batch sizes and production sequences) to fully utilise the flexibility of this facility. To achieve the second-degree discrimination, the manufacturer provides multiple products and follows a priority rule in the production schedule. To obtain economies of scale, the manufacturer may offer a composite product targeting the whole population, or choose a dedicated product to serve a proportion of customers. Comparing these three production choices, we observe that the optimal product variety strategy is threshold controlled by the relative ratio of customer arrival rates, the relative difference between customers’ marginal valuations and the production technology.