Revenue management without demand forecasting: a data-driven approach for bid price generation

Ezgi C. Eren (), Zhaoyang Zhang, Jonas Rauch, Ravi Kumar and Royce Kallesen
Additional contact information
Ezgi C. Eren: PROS Inc
Zhaoyang Zhang: PROS Inc
Jonas Rauch: PROS Inc
Ravi Kumar: PROS Inc
Royce Kallesen: PROS Inc

Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, 2024, vol. 23, issue 6, No 2, 499-516

Abstract: Abstract Traditional revenue management relies on long and stable historical data and predictable demand patterns. However, meeting those requirements is not always possible. Many industries face demand volatility on an ongoing basis, an example would be air cargo which has much shorter booking horizon with highly variable batch arrivals. Even for passenger airlines where revenue management (RM) is well-established, reacting to external shocks is a well-known challenge that requires user monitoring and manual intervention. Moreover, traditional RM comes with strict data requirements including historical bookings (or transactions) and pricing (or availability) even in the absence of any bookings, spanning multiple years. For companies that have not established a practice in RM, that type of extensive data is usually not available. We present a data-driven approach to RM which eliminates the need for demand forecasting and optimization techniques. We develop a methodology to generate bid prices using historical booking data only. Our approach is an ex-post greedy heuristic to estimate proxies for marginal opportunity costs as a function of remaining capacity and time-to-departure solely based on historical booking data. We utilize a neural network algorithm to project bid price estimations into the future. We conduct an extensive simulation study where we measure our methodology’s performance compared to that of an optimally generated bid price using dynamic programming (DP) and compare results in terms of both revenue and load factor. We also extend our simulations to measure performance of both data-driven and DP generated bid prices under the presence of demand misspecification. Our results show that our data-driven methodology stays near a theoretical optimum (

Keywords: Data-driven revenue management; Distribution-free revenue management; Heuristic bid price generation; Robust revenue management; Neural network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41272-023-00465-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:jorapm:v:23:y:2024:i:6:d:10.1057_s41272-023-00465-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41272

DOI: 10.1057/s41272-023-00465-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management is currently edited by Ian Yeoman

More articles in Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().