Resource and Revenue Management in Nonprofit Operations
研究了非营利组织通过营利活动补贴公益使命时的资源分配与定价问题，构建多期随机动态规划模型，给出最优阈值策略，并通过数值实验评估银行机制与动态定价的价值。
Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities for the purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption versus investment trade-off, where investment corresponds to providing capacity for revenue customers, and consumption corresponds to serving mission customers. Exemplary of this approach are the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, where profitable paying hospitals are used to subsidize care at free hospitals. We model this problem as a multiperiod stochastic dynamic program. In each period, the organization must decide how much of the current assets should be invested in revenue-customer service capacity, and at what price the service should be sold. We provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal capacity and pricing decisions are of threshold type. Similar results are derived when the selling price is fixed, but the banking of assets from one period to the next is allowed. We compare the performance of the optimal threshold policy with heuristics that may be more appealing to managers of nonprofit organizations, and we assess the value of banking and of dynamic pricing through numerical experiments.