E-commerce and omnichannel retail strategies have revolutionized the way consumers buy products, but maintaining consistent pricing across global markets can be an obstacle for organizations. By harnessing a focused data science strategy, organizations can avoid pricing pitfalls.

Retail customers may accept different prices on different channels — but retailers need to manage new complexities to make it work. These include understanding what customers value in each channel and how that affects what they will pay, giving store employees the right language for talking about price differences, and working out operational challenges. Getting it right has a real payoff: Retailers that effectively price differently across all channels see bottom-line growth of 2 to 5%.

Identifying the optimal prices for products was once a time-consuming process. That’s changing as businesses start to take advantage of advances in machine learning, increases in computing speed, and greater availability of data.

There’s a great deal of enthusiasm about platform strategies these days. Entrepreneurs pitch their startups as the next Uber, the next Facebook, or the next Airbnb, while executives in established companies are retooling their strategies around platforms to drive growth and compete digitally. But creating a successful platform business is not easy — as economists Richard Schmalensee and David S. Evans explain in this MIT Sloan Management Review interview.

IHG is gaining a competitive advantage from applying advanced analytics to pricing and marketing. “Addressing complexity, if you can address complexity in modern marketing, gives companies a competitive advantage that can take time for competitors to replicate,” say IHG executives Larry Seligman, Jim Sprigg, Angela Galeziowski, and Dev Koushik, in a group interview.

Smart data and mass customization have the potential to radically change the way trips are planned. Already, the Boston-based startup Bridj is piloting a dynamic bus system that optimizes routing in response to demand, while Düsseldorf Airport is piloting a robotic parking system in which users just drop off their cars, which are then parked automatically. In the future, intermodal routing could provide customers with a seamless experience and reshape the transportation infrastructure.

There are usually no winners in price wars. But under the right circumstances, it’s possible to win a price war by leveraging a specific set of strategic capabilities. These include the ability to read how things are changing, the skills to analyze data to identify trends and opportunities and the wherewithal to implement organizational changes both internally and across the value chain. Albert Heijn, a Dutch grocer, started and won a price war through its strategic capabilities and skills.

Andreas Hinterhuber and Stephan Liozu write that pricing scholars lean toward recommending customer value-based pricing. They provide a mini case study of how to use this method to make sure that you don’t leave money on the table.

Companies differ in their approaches to price setting, but most fall into one of three buckets: cost-based, competition-based or customer value-based. Customer value-based pricing uses data on the perceived customer value of the product as the main factor to determine prices.

However, implementing customer value-based pricing is not easy. Developing a customer value-based pricing program is a multiyear project demanding executive attention and requiring substantial changes in corporate processes.

Social coupons have become a popular form of marketing promotion. Businesses such as restaurants, car washes and dry cleaners pitch coupon discounts through Internet sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial in hopes of attracting a new crop of customers. But a poorly designed coupon campaign can do serious harm to a business’s profit margin. While the coupons can generate value for customers and the social coupon service providers themselves, they can lead businesses into a thicket of problems.

How will you make a profit when customers know everything about your costs? The answer could be about putting a dollar value to access and charging admission to your store.

Since the mid-1990s, many companies have outsourced or offshored their manufacturing operations. For most, one crucial enabling factor was cheap oil: Long supply lines were economically feasible because transportation costs were relatively low. Hence, companies emphasized reducing manufacturing costs through (1) offshoring or outsourcing; (2) plant rationalization; and (3) consolidating distribution centers and warehouses to reduce inventory levels and minimize fixed facility costs.

Students and companies have changing expectations for executive MBA programs. How should business schools respond?

Should you price a consumer product at a price that ends in 99 cents — or price it at a round dollar amount?

Want to increase sales of a bundle of goods or services that includes both pleasurable and utilitarian items? Research suggests that a discount will increase sales more effectively if it’s offered on the pleasurable item.

When should a company “nickel-and-dime” customers by charging separately for various extras, and when is it better to combine all of the charges into one total price? It depends on a variety of factors, such as whether customers comparison shop, whether they are more sensitive to the prices of some components (delivery) than to others, whether the price of one component is small or large relative to the others, and whether the company controls the costs and quality of a particular component.

Recent evidence shows that some discounts and sales can be detrimental.