Correspondence: Géraldine Heilporn, HEC Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7. E-mail: geraldine.heilporn@hec.ca

¹completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics at Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2004. In 2008, she was awarded a PhD jointly from Université Libre de Bruxelles and Université de Montréal. She is a member of CIRRELT (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation). She is presently a postdoctoral fellow of the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management at HEC Montréal.

²is Professor and Dean of the Science Faculty at Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has published more than 80 papers in major refereed scientific journals. Her main research area is combinatorial optimization, including graph theory and integer programming problems and with a particular emphasis on location and network design problems. She has also served on the editorial board of several journals.

³is Professor and Chairman at the Computer Science and Operations Research Department of the University of Montreal. He has published more than 70 papers in the field of optimization, focusing on variational inequalities and bilevel programming, with applications in network equilibrium and revenue management. He is currently Area Editor (continuous optimization) of the journal Operations Research Letters, as well as Associate Editor for Operations Research and Transportation Science.

⁴is Professor and Dean of Research and Innovation at École Polytechnique (Montréal) and member of the GERAD (Group for Research in Decision Analysis) and CIRRELT. He has published more than 60 papers in major refereed scientific journals. He is a leading expert in both the theory and practice of bilevel programming and in the development of global algorithms for non-convex optimization.

Received 3 August 2009; Revised 3 August 2009; Published online 30 October 2009.

Abstract

In this study, we establish a parallel between two classes of pricing problems that have attracted the attention of researchers in marketing, theoretical computer science and operations research, each community addressing issues from its own vantage point. More precisely, we contrast the problems of pricing a network or a product line, in order to achieve maximum revenue, given that customers maximize their individual utility. Throughout the article, we focus on problems that can be formulated as mixed-integer programs.