Hare And Tortoise: How Do Price Change Patterns Affect Propensity To Book

This is to certify that the thesis/dissertation prepared By Entitled For the degree of Is approved by the final examining committee: Chair To the best of my knowledge and as understood by the student in the Research Integrity and Copyright Disclaimer (Graduate School Form 20), this thesis/dissertation adheres to the provisions of Purdue University's " Policy on Integrity in Research " and the use of copyrighted material. ii 谢谢你永远在我身边 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Chun-Hung Tang, for his invaluable support, guidance, and encouragement throughout this project as well as my graduate education. Without his kind instructions and help, this thesis could not have been possible. Besides, it is my honor to have Dr. Nicely as my committee members. I am very thankful for their helpful comments and advices throughout the completion of my research. Thanks to my husband and my parents, for their endless love and support. I would also like to thank my friends, Jiaqi Zhu, Mengwei Yue and Ruoyang Zhang, for their help and encouragement. With an increasing using of online booking, hotel room rate changing information becomes nearly transparent to consumers. And this trend encourages deal-seeking consumer behaviors, which are based on price change information. So hotels can influence consumers' propensity to book through managing price changes. The present study aims at examining consumers' propensity to book in a more realistic context by introducing two conditions: different price changing patterns and interaction between price-moving trends and price patterns. It is important for hotel managers to understand the impact of different price change trends and patterns because price changes can directly affect consumer perception and booking behavior. Results indicated that, hotels should choose different price change patterns for specific price change trend for the following reasons that: first, leaping price change patterns generally have greater effects on consumers' propensity to book; second, price change trends moderate the effect of leaping patterns on consumers' propensity to book. Additionally, finding also showed that hotels could affect consumers' propensity to book by influencing consumers' perceived sellout risk and expectation of future price. 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background It has been indicated by many studies that revenue management principles incorporating the concept of demand-based variable pricing, and dynamic pricing have been used by the hospitality industry as a primary approach to achieve the maximum profits (Gallego increasing usage of online searching and …