Today’s technology facilitates selling strategies that were unthinkable only a few years ago. One increasingly popular strategy uses incompletely specified products (ICSPs). The seller retains the right to specify some details of the product or service after the sale. The selling strategies’ main advantages are an additional dimension for market segmentation and operational flexibility due to supply-side substitution possibilities. Since the strategy became popular with Priceline and Hotwire in the travel industry about two decades ago, it has increasingly been adopted by other industries with stochastic demand and limited capacity as well. At the same time, it is actively researched from the perspectives of strategic operations management, empirics, and revenue management.

This paper first describes the application of ICSPs in practice. Then, we introduce the different research communities that are active in this field and relate the terminology they use. The main part is an exhaustive review of the literature on selling ICSPs from the different perspectives. Here, we complement a tabular overview with an introduction into the community and a detailed description of each paper. Finally, possible directions for future research are outlined.

We see that strategic operations management has described advantages of ICSPs over other strategies in a variety of settings, but also identified countervailing effects. Today, empirical research is confined to hotels and airlines and largely disconnected from the other perspectives. Operational papers are ample, but mostly concerned with the availability of ICSPs. Research on operational (dynamic) pricing is surprisingly scarce.

Today’s technology facilitates selling strategies that were unthinkable only a few years ago. One increasingly popular strategy uses incompletely specified products (ICSPs). The seller retains the right to specify some details of the product or service after the sale. The selling strategies’ main advantages are an additional dimension for market segmentation and operational flexibility due to supply-side substitution possibilities. Since the strategy became popular with Priceline and Hotwire in the travel industry about two decades ago, it has increasingly been adopted by other industries with stochastic demand and limited capacity as well. At the same time, it is actively researched from the perspectives of strategic operations management, empirics, and revenue management.

This paper first describes the application of ICSPs in practice. Then, we introduce the different research communities that are active in this field and relate the terminology they use. The main part is an exhaustive review of the literature on selling ICSPs from the different perspectives. Here, we complement a tabular overview with an introduction into the community and a detailed description of each paper. Finally, possible directions for future research are outlined.

We see that strategic operations management has described advantages of ICSPs over other strategies in a variety of settings, but also identified countervailing effects. Today, empirical research is confined to hotels and airlines and largely disconnected from the other perspectives. Operational papers are ample, but mostly concerned with the availability of ICSPs. Research on operational (dynamic) pricing is surprisingly scarce.

A major benefit of flexible products is that they allow for supply-side substitution even after they have been sold. This helps improve capacity utilization and increase the overall revenue in a stochastic environment. As several authors have shown, flexible products can be incorporated into the well-known deterministic linear program (DLP) of revenue management׳s capacity control. In this paper, we show that flexible products have an additional “value of flexibility” due to their supply-side substitution possibilities, which can be captured monetarily. However, the DLP-based approaches proposed so far fail to capture this value and, thus, steadily undervalue flexible products, resulting in lower overall revenues. To take the full potential of flexible products into account, we propose a new approach that systematically increases the revenues of flexible products when solving the DLP and performing capacity control. A mathematical function of variables available during the booking horizon represents this artificial markup and adapts dynamically to the current situation. We determine the function׳s parameters using a standard simulation-based optimization method. Numerical experiments show that the benefits of the new approach are biggest when low value demand arrives early. Revenues are improved by up to 5% in many settings.

While flexible products have been popular for many years in practice, they have only recently gained attention in the academic literature on revenue management. When selling a flexible product, a firm retains the right to specify some of its details later. The relevant point in time is after the sale, but often before the provision of the product or service, depending on the customers’ need to know the exact specification in advance. The resulting flexibility can help to increase revenues if capacity is fixed and the demand to come difficult to forecast. We present several revenue management models and control mechanisms incorporating this kind of flexible products. An extensive numerical study shows how the different approaches can mitigate the negative impact of demand forecast errors.

Revenue management with flexible products has experienced a growing interest in the academic literature within the last few years. Flexible products allow supply-side substitution between resources and can therefore help to maximize overall revenue as well as capacity utilization in markets with highly uncertain demand. This paper addresses the question of how the mathematical models which have been developed for capacity control with flexible products should be used over time to exploit the substitution opportunities, while keeping practical applicability in mind. Several dynamic control mechanisms are proposed, each of which makes use of the flexibility to a different extent. A comprehensive computational study shows the potential of the different approaches by revealing their strengths and weaknesses.