2020 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 261-266
One approach for increasing the revenue of railway undertakings is to adopt yield management techniques, by setting quotas for discount ticket sales of reserved seats on express trains. We developed a method to calculate the optimum sales quota, incorporating estimations for the demand of various discount tickets and purchase behavior of passengers with the next-best-option when they were not able to buy their desired ticket. We conducted a trial sale by applying the calculated sales quota into the actual seat reservation system and confirmed that the method can increase revenues and facilitate decision-making for setting sales quotas.
