Operations Management and Business Pricing

The field of revenue management originated within the operations research community and is concerned with demand management and related pricing decisions. Pricing has not traditionally been one of the mainstream operations management (OM) concerns, but revenue management is attracting a substantial amount of OM research. While revenue management has had significant impact on the management of demand and pricing for consumer services, the management of business pricing decisions has received comparably much less attention within this community. This paper reviews fundamental differences between business and consumer commerce, discusses current business pricing practice, brings to light gaps between this practice and revenue management based pricing research, and identifies future trends for research and applications in the area of business pricing that might benefit from OM research.