Optimal two-stage pricing strategies from the seller’s perspective under the uncertainty of buyer’s decisions

Abstract

In Punta del Este, a resort town in Uruguay, real-estate property is in demand by both domestic and foreign buyers. There are several stages of selling residential units: before, during, and after the actual construction. Different pricing strategies are used at every stage. Our goal in this paper is to derive, under various scenarios of practical relevance, optimal strategies for setting prices within two-stage selling framework, as well as to explore the optimal timing for accomplishing these tasks in order to maximize the overall seller's expected revenue. Specifically, we put forward a general two-period pricing model and explore pricing strategies from the seller's perspective, when the buyer's decisions in the two periods are uncertain: commodity valuations may or may not be independent, may or may not follow the same distribution, be heavily or just lightly influenced by exogenous economic conditions, and so on. Our theoretical findings are illustrated with numerical and graphical examples using appropriately constructed parametric models.