PONE-D-22-19479A note on competitive analysis of online revenue management with two hierarchical resourcesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Ni,

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PLOS ONE

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We inform you that your paper has received the major revision for the possible publication. Please see the comments of reviewers and kindly revise your paper and submit with the response letter at the earliest convenience.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: N/A

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The paper studies a general and standard revenue management problems with different types of customers (who inheriate heterogeneity in their valuation on the services). A model is proposed to describe the pricing and system performance.

The problem is indeed important, while the paper fails to convince me its academic innovation and methodological contributions in the area of revenue management and pricing. In fact, there are a super rich of literature dealing with this problem and huge set of theoretical results are already presented. The modelling setting and assumptions adopoted in this paper seem to not the commonly used ones in literature in a negative way (for example, the paper assumes a segemented deterministic valuation on the service, not a distribution), which makes the results much less valueble and interesting.

In general, I suggest the authors to dive more into the rich literature and justify its academic innovation more clearly.

Reviewer #2: This paper studies an online revenue maximization problem of assigning heterogeneous customers to two levels of resources with capacity constraints. It extends the previous work in the literature with two classes of customers to a more general case with m (>1) classes of customers. From the perspective of competitive analysis, both an upper bound and an optimal online algorithm named ONPS (i.e., online nested protection strategy) are proposed. The topic is interesting, and the theoretical results are meaningful. The paper is also well organized in general.

There are some minor concerns as follows.

1) At the end of the 2nd last paragraph of the Introduction section, it is suggested to briefly explain and highlight the marginal contribution from the theoretical or practical perspective in this work.

2) In the 2nd paragraph of page 2, it seems that f_k is used to denote the price of the kth class of resources, while in Section 2 on page 4, f_i represents the reservation price of customers in class C_i. This may cause confusion. It is suggested to replace f_k with p_k or another notation in the former one.

3) The presentation of this work needs some improvement. For example,

(1) lines 109- 111 on page 5, “is measured by the ratio between the objective revenue achieved by the online strategy and the revenue by an optimal offline strategy, which is called…”.

(2) Line -7 on page 6, “The reasoning of part (2), However, is non-trivial. Firstly, …”

(3) It is suggested to delete words “we have” or “we have that” in many places in the context, such as in line -3 on page 6 and line 1 on page 7.

(4) Line 213 on page 10, which implies

(5) Line 252 on page 11, constraints

Reviewer #3: The authors provide an extension on an already published paper that deals with the competitive analysis of online revenue management with two hierarchical resources. Specifically, the authors generalize this concept to more than two classes of customers. The authors have provided the detailed theoretical analysis in order to support the extension. The provided mathematical analysis in the paper is detailed and correct and the authors have provided all the intermediate steps in order to enable the average leader to easily follow it. The authors should consider the following suggestions provided by the reviewer in order to improve the scientific depth of their manuscript, as well as they need to address the following comments in order to improve the quality of presentation of their manuscript. Initially, the title of the paper needs to be changed as it seems like the authors identify a mistake in the existing article based on the title that they have used. It needs to be clarified that this is an extension to an existing published paper where other authors have originally thought of novel ideas and problem formulations and this paper extends an already published research work. In Section 1, the authors need to better identify the research gap that exists in the literature as it seems that there are several practical based approaches, such as Grieco, Luigi Alfredo, et al., eds. Ad-Hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks: 19th International Conference on Ad-Hoc Networks and Wireless, ADHOC-NOW 2020, Bari, Italy, October 19–21, 2020, Proceedings. Vol. 12338. Springer Nature, 2020, that they deal with the same problem from a game theoretic point of view. The authors need to substantially revise the provided related work. In Section 2, the authors need to include at the very beginning a table summarizing the main notation that has been used in the paper which is extremely excessive in its current form. At the end of Section 3, the authors need to include an additional subsection discussing potential application fields where the proposed theoretical model can provide realistic solutions. Finally, the manuscript needs to be checked for typos, syntax, and grammar errors in order to improve the quality of its presentation.

Reviewer #4: Thank you for your interesting work and this note surely pushes the boundary of related research. A few comments:

1) On Page 2, second paragraph. It might be easier for readers if "sub-classes" are defined beforehand.

2) The connection to Ball and Queyranne was clearly stated; however, the explaination of the difference between this paper and B&Q, especially the fact that your two resources are "downgrade" compatible, unlike B&Q, can be clearer.

3) A possible improvement is to justify the fact that we know the customer's reservation price when he/she arrives.

A nicely written paper overall. Thank you for making the paper clear and readable. I enjoyed it a lot.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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Competitive analysis of online revenue management with two hierarchical resources and multiple fare classes

PONE-D-22-19479R1

Dear Dr. Ni,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Ronnason Chinram, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The revised manuscript has been well improved in presentation and organization. This paper is in scope of the journal and scientifically valid which is worthy of publication. It is my pleasure to explain that your paper has been received the accepted for the possible publication.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: The revised manuscript has been well improve in presentation and organization. There are no further comments.

Reviewer #3: The authors have addressed in detail the reviewers' comments. This reviewer has no further concerns regarding this paper.

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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