Revenue management (RM) is one of the most successful applications in Operations Research. The RM has grown from its application with a handful of major airlines to its status today as a mainstream business practice with a growing list of industry users from Walt Disney Resorts to National Car Rental and a supporting industry of software and consulting firms. Over this same time period, academic and industry research on RM methodology has also grown rapidly. While the number of published papers on RM has increased in dramatic measures, there is still no book that comprehensively covers the field of RM. Such a book is a pressing need because:
Much of the "Institutional" knowledge of revenue management is relatively inaccessible to those outside the profession.
It is difficult to find the fundamental and seminal ideas in the literature because these ideas either do not appear in published journals or appear in relatively obscure sources.
The terminology, concepts, and notation need to be standardized, so the general reader can understand and apply the contributions in the RM literature.
The gap between practitioners and academics in the field needs to be closed.
The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management is a book that will meet these needs. It comprehensively covers theory and practice of the entire field, including both quantity and price-based RM, as well as significant coverage of supporting topics such as forecasting and economics. The authors believe such a comprehensive approach is necessary to fully understand the subject. A central objective of the book is to unify the various forms of RM and to link them closely to each other and to the supporting fields of statistics and economics. Nevertheless, the topics and coverage do reflect choices about what is important to understand RM. Hence, the book's purpose is to provide a comprehensive, accessible synthesis of the state-of-the-art in Revenue Management.