Abstract: A discrete choice model of consumer demand is employed to generate controls to limit or open up availability of inventory of a resource, for example, thereby improving the revenue of a firm offering the resource for sale. The consumer's choice process is modeled as a set of choice probabilities that depend on what alternatives are available at that moment. An optimization algorithm is preferably employed for determining what choices to offer for sale at any point of time in a pricing or revenue management system. An estimation algorithm that is preferably used with the choice model for estimating the size of the potential customer base and estimating the price and product attribute value sensitivity of customers based solely on historical and transactional data (hypothesizing as unobservable, customer no-purchases).

Abstract: A revenue management software system supports decisions to accept or deny requests for resource capacity (seats, rooms, volume/weight, air time, etc.) using control logic that accesses multidimensional lookup tables of price values for each resource (flight leg, hotel day, etc.). Each dimension of each lookup table corresponds to a variable that affects the value for the resource. As an example where the resource is airline seating capacity for a given flight itinerary, a two-dimensional threshold value table is employed for each flight leg in the itinerary where the first dimension specifies the current time slot and the other dimension the current number of reservations accepted (reservation level) for the flight leg. A request for a seat on the flight is accepted if and only if its net revenue exceeds or equals the sum of the current table values (i.e. the table entries corresponding to the current time and current reservation level) for each requested flight leg.