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Thursday, Oct 15, 2009Study shows E-Travel wins on pricing and earns ‘Best Paper’ honors
Posted by dgore
FACULTY
Professor Nelson Granados was awarded 2009 eBusiness Best Paper for the study “Online and Offline Demand and Price Elasticities: Evidence from the Air Travel Industry” at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October.
Dr. Granados is an assistant professor of Information Systems at the Graziadio School and teaches at the Irvine campus. His research findings suggest that consumer demand in the Internet channel is more price-elastic for both transparent and opaque online travel agencies. The award-winning paper discusses the broader implications for multi-channel pricing strategy and for the transparency-based design of online selling mechanisms.
“The Internet has brought consumers increased access to information to make purchase decisions,” Granados wrote. “One of the consequences is an increase in the price elasticity of demand, or the percent change in demand due to a percent change in price, because consumers are better able to compare offerings from multiple suppliers.”
The paper, analyzed the impact of the Internet on demand, by comparing the demand functions in the Internet and traditional air travel channels. The authors used a data set that contains information for millions of records or airline ticket sales in both offline and online channels.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study that uses massive sales data to compare consumer demand functions in the two channels,” said Granados.
Dr. Granados’ co-authors are Alok Gupta at the University of Minnesota and Robert Kaufman at Arizona State University.
Granados joins Keytro Corporation’s advisory board
In related news, Dr. Granados was appointed to the advisory board of Keytro Corporation. He will regularly review company data, ensure the Keytro marketplace is operating efficiently, act as a sounding board for IT-related strategic decision making, and meet formally with Keytro’s executive committee twice a year.
Keytro.com is a first-of-its-kind business solutions marketplace that dramatically reduces the time and effort required to find and connect with sales representatives. Keytro empowers buyers to search for sales professionals whose listings match keywords related to the buyers’ desired solutions. Going beyond search, Keytro helps buyers engage sellers electronically to prequalify the need-solution fit.
“Sites like Keytro.com are very exciting to me, because they challenge the status quo with the use of technology. It has been fun working with the executive team to develop Keytro’s innovative buyer/seller marketplace,” Granados said.
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