Title: Pricing strategies under customer recapture in airline revenue management
Authors: Prashant Kumar Garg; Sri Vanamalla Venkataraman
Addresses: Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India ' Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India
Abstract: Airline revenue management (RM) focuses on techniques such as dynamic variation of price and seat inventory control. There is a lack of sufficient literature on pricing strategies in competitive environments. In this research we attempt to address the problem of optimal seat allocation and pricing in a duopoly where each of the competing airlines has two fare-classes. We study Nash equilibrium (NE) by extending the work of Mazumdar and Ramachandran (2014) by including the phenomena of recapturing of passengers who overflow to the competitor's airline. We develop optimisation models which incorporate this condition and develop an algorithm to obtain their optimal solutions. These solutions determine the pay-offs in the formulation of the underlying strategic form game between the competing airlines. The NE of this game under various scenarios are finally computed and analysed.
Keywords: revenue management; pricing; duopoly; customer recapture; Nash equilibrium.
International Journal of Revenue Management, 2020 Vol.11 No.4, pp.264 - 276
Received: 29 May 2019
Accepted: 17 May 2020
Published online: 26 Oct 2020 *