Dupuit, Colson and the beginnings of the SNCF: The road to Yield Management

Dupuit, Colson et les débuts de la SNCF: La voie vers le Yield Management

Joachim Paoli ()
Additional contact information
Joachim Paoli: UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon, Iaelyon - Iaelyon School of Management - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon, MAGELLAN - Laboratoire de Recherche Magellan - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE) - Lyon

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The Yield Management is the main method used nowadays by airlines companies in order to set their prices. It is often presented as an innovation developed inside the airline sector in the United States at the end of the 1970's. However, this paper demonstrates, that it has important similarities with an older theory: the pricing method of infrastructures exploited by a monopoly proposed by Jules Dupuit in 1844, developed by Clément Colson from 1890 and applied by SNCF at its creation in 1937. Indeed, Yield Management is based on Dupuit's idea of charging each user a price as close as possible of to the use value attributed to the transport. To get users to reveal this use value, low-cost companies use an option mechanism that is found in Colson's developments and in the pricing system used when the SNCF was created.

Keywords: economist-engineers; Railroad pricing; airline transport pricing; Dupuit Jules; Colson; Ingénieurs-économistes; Tarification des chemins de fer; Tarification des transports aériens; Yield management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Revue d'économie financière, 2024, 153, pp.299-310

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-04448093

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().