Abstract

Dynamic price discrimination adjusts prices based on the option value of future sales, which varies with time and units available. This paper surveys the theoretical literature on dynamic price discrimination, and confronts the theories with new data from airline pricing behavior, Consider a multiple booking class airline-seat inventory control problem that relates to either a single flight leg or to multiple flight legs. During the time before the flight, the airline may face the problems of (1) what are the suitable prices for the opened booking classes, and (2) when to close those opened booking classes. This work deals with these two problems by only using the pricing policy. In this paper, a dynamic pricing model is developed in which the demand for tickets is modeled as a discrete time stochastic process. An important result of this work is that the strategy for the ticket booking policy can be reduced to sets of critical decision periods, which eliminates the need for large amounts of data storage.