基于乘客选择行为的双航班机票联合动态定价模型

Joint dynamic pricing for two parallel flights based on passenger choice behavior

以同一航空公司同一航线上两个不同时段的航班为对象,从乘客在两个航班之间的选择行为出发,研究了航空公司的双航班联合动态定价问题.模型中,潜在乘客基于航班时间和机票价格两个因素做出机票购买的选择.采用乘客的心理价位分布来刻画乘客对价格的敏感性;将乘客划分为对出行时间具有严格要求和出行时间比较灵活两大类别.航空公司基于乘客的需求特征,采用价格手段来引导和控制需求,以最大化双航班的整体期望收益.建立了一个离散时间模型,刻画了各周期最优联合定价决策的性质;利用该性质可以极大地缩小最优定价决策的搜索空间,从而有效节省计算代价.

There have been numerous papers that focus on the revenue management and/or dynamic pricing of a single flight. Starting from the passenger＇s choice behavior between the flights, this paper, however, seeks to study the joint dynamic pricing decisions of two parallel flights of the same flight course which are owned by a same airline company and are scheduled at different times. In the model, potential passengers make ticket purchasing choices based on the combination of the departure time and the ticket prices. We use the distribution of ＂reservation price＂ to characterize the passengers＇ sensitivity towards price; and attribute the passengers into two categories, which are those who have strict requirements on departure time and those who are flexible towards departure time. By dynamically adjusting the ticket prices, the airline controls/inducts the demand, so as to maximize the total expected revenue of the two flights. We developed a discrete-time model and characterized the form of the optimal joint pricing decisions. Based on such properties, we can greatly reduce the searching space of the optimal pricing decisions, and can thus save the computing effort efficiently.