Optimizing Variable Opaque Product Design in E-commerce Based on Blind Booking

As a newly emerging marketing mode, opaque selling has achieved great success in practice and attracted wide attention from academic. Most existing researches related to opaque selling are based on NYOP (Name your own price) or VOP (variable opaque product). In recent years, the NYOP modes opened by service integrators have been fully discussed. With VOP becoming increasingly important for service providers, related investigations are badly needed. In order to promote and guide the application of VOP, key issues such as pricing, opacity determining and positioning are investigated based on Blind booking service of Germanwings. The results specify the basic principles for setting price function and the compute logic for determining opacity scope. By analyzing the relation between customer utility and risk preference factor, the VOP positioning problem is settled from the aspect of customers’ channel selecting. The analytical outcome also verifies the effectiveness of opaque selling in market segmentation. Finally, a numeric example is taken to explain how the results of this paper can be used in practice