Pricing science

Pricing science is the application of social and business science methods to the problem of setting prices. Methods include economic modeling, statistics, econometrics, mathematical programming. This discipline had its origins in the development of yield management in the airline industry in the 1980s, and has since spread to many other sectors and pricing contexts, including yield management in other travel industry sectors, media, retail, manufacturing and distribution.

Pricing science work is effectuated in a variety of ways, from strategic advice on pricing on defining segments for which pricing strategies may vary, to enterprise-class software applications, integrated into price quoting and selling processes.

Pricing science has its roots in the development of yield management programs developed by the airline industry shortly after deregulation of the industry in the early 1980s. These programs provided model-based support to answer the central question faced by deregulated airlines: "How many bookings should I accept, for each fare product that I offer on each flight departure that I operate, so that I maximize my revenue?" Finding the best answers required developing statistical algorithms to predict the number of booked passengers who would show up and to predict the number of additional bookings to expect for each fare product. It also required developing optimization algorithms and formulations to find the best solution, given the characteristics of the forecasts. And for airlines operating hundreds to thousands of flights every day, and selling tickets for daily departures 300 days into the future, the computational challenges are extreme.

The yield management programs provided dramatic financial benefits to their early adopters in the early- to mid-1980s, and the approach spread rapidly to firms in the related sectors of hotel, rental car, and cruise line industries. While there are important differences between these industries, the dominant drivers of the solutions were the perishable nature of the resource being sold, demand patterns that were time-variable, and the limited capacity available for sale. For a good overview of pricing science methods and applications related to yield or revenue management, see Phillips and the references cited therein. Williams shows the connection between many of these problems and standard micro-economics.

Beginning in the early to mid-1990s, these successes spawned efforts to apply the methods, or develop new methods, to support pricing and related decisions in a variety of other settings. Yield management has been applied successfully to broadcast and cable television, online media, oil and gas producers, sporting and theatrical providers, online media, apartment and timeshare rental properties, credit card, and retail settings.

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