Travel providers such as airlines and on-line travel agents are becoming more and more interested in understanding how passengers choose among alternative itineraries when searching for flights. This knowledge helps them better display and adapt their offer, taking into account market conditions and customer needs. Some common applications are not only filtering and sorting alternatives, but also changing certain attributes in real-time (e.g., changing the price). In this paper, we concentrate with the problem of modeling air passenger choices of flight itineraries. This problem has historically been tackled using classical Discrete Choice Modelling techniques. Traditional statistical approaches, in particular the Multinomial Logit model (MNL), is widely used in industrial applications due to its simplicity and general good performance. However, MNL models present several shortcomings and assumptions that might not hold in real applications. To overcome these difficulties, we present a new choice model based on Pointer Networks. Given an input sequence, this type of deep neural architecture combines Recurrent Neural Networks with the Attention Mechanism to learn the conditional probability of an output whose values correspond to positions in an input sequence. Therefore, given a sequence of different alternatives presented to a customer, the model can learn to point to the one most likely to be chosen by the customer. The proposed method was evaluated on a real dataset that combines on-line user search logs and airline flight bookings. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional MNL model on several metrics.
In addition, there is a family of methods which is more concerned with correctly simulating the human choice making process @cite_35 . Research in this area has revealed different phenomena influencing human choice (e.g., the similarity effect, the compromise effect, and the attraction effect) @cite_1 and tries to define models able to capture them from choice data.
@cite_35 @cite_1
2104686997 2051481424
Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales, to describe and test theories of behavior, and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations of expected utility theory to obtain an econometric system that describes consumers' choices over available options, and to thus characterize product demand. The basic framework has been augmented significantly to account for quantity choices, to accommodate purchases of several products on a single purchase occasion (multiple discreteness and multicategory purchases), and to allow for asymmetric switching between brands across different price tiers. These extensions have enabled researchers to bring the analysis to bear on several related marketing phenomena of interest. This paper has three main objectives. The first objective is to articulate the main goals of demand analysis---forecasting, measurement, and testing---and to highlight several considerations associated with these goals. Our second objective is to describe the main building blocks of individual-level demand models. We discuss approaches built on direct and indirect utility specifications of demand systems, and we review extensions that have appeared in the marketing literature. The third objective is to explore a few emerging directions in demand analysis, including considering demand-side dynamics, combining purchase data with primary information, and using semiparametric and nonparametric approaches. We hope researchers new to this literature will take away a broader perspective on these models and see the potential for new directions in future research. Most economists define rationality in terms of consistency principles. These principles place ?bounds? on rationality?bounds that range from perfect consistency to weak stochastic transitivity. Several decades of research on preferential choice has demonstrated how and when people violate these bounds. Many of these violations are interconnected and reflect systematic behavioral principles. We discuss the robustness of the violations and review the theories that are able to predict them. We further discuss the adaptive functions of the violations. From this perspective, choices do more than reveal preferences; they also reflect subtle, yet often quite reasonable, dependencies on the environment.