Asymptotic optimal solutions for airline revenue management with cancelation and no-shows
In this paper, we study the asymptotical optimal solutions for the general airline revenue management problem, considering both customer cancelations and no-shows. We study a simple case where there is only one fare-class; the management controls the opening and closing of the fare-class, with the objective of maximizing the total revenue. We first develop a fluid control problem, where the customer arrival and cancelation processes are treated as deterministic, whereas the no. of no-shows is random. The optimal fluid solution is shown to have a simple structure of accepting up to a single time point t* and rejecting afterwards. We show that this policy acts as an upper bound for the MDP problem. Applying the optimal fluid solution to the stochastic environment, we show that this policy is asymptotically optimal on the fluid scaling.
This article analyzes a sequential search model where firms face identical but stochastic production costs, the realizations of which are unknown to consumers. We characterize a perfect Bayesian equilibrium satisfying a reservation price property and provide a sufficient condition for such an equilibrium to exist. We show that (i) firms set on average higher prices and make larger profits compared to the scenario where consumers observe production costs, (ii) expected prices and consumer welfare can be non-monotonic in the number of firms, and (iii) the impact of production cost uncertainty vanishes as the number of firms becomes very large.