A Randomized Linear Programming Method for Network Revenue Management with Product-Specific No-Shows
By Sumit Kunnumkal, Kalyan Talluri, Huseyin Topaloglu
Transportation Science | February 2012
DOI
pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/trsc.1110.0386
Citation
Kunnumkal, Sumit., Talluri, Kalyan., Topaloglu, Huseyin. A Randomized Linear Programming Method for Network Revenue Management with Product-Specific No-Shows Transportation Science pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/trsc.1110.0386.
Copyright
Transportation Science, 2012
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Abstract
Revenue management practices often include overbooking capacity to account for customers who make reservations but do not show up. In this paper, we consider the network revenue management problem with no-shows and overbooking, where the show up probabilities are specific to each product. We propose a randomized linear program to jointly make the capacity control and overbooking decisions. We establish that our solution method gives an upper bound on the optimal expected total profit and that this upper bound is tighter than that obtained by the standard deterministic
linear program that appears in the existing literature. We describe how the randomized linear program can be used to obtain a bid price control policy. Numerical experiments indicate that our approach can provide significant improvements over standard benchmark methods.

Sumit Kunnumkal is a Professor and Area Leader of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He holds a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his MS in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Tech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Professor Kunnumkal has previously taught at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, and has held visiting positions at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lie in the areas of pricing and revenue management, retail operations, assortment planning, and approximate dynamic programming.

At ISB, he has taught in the PGP programme, the Fellow programme, and various Advanced Management and Executive Education programmes.

Sumit Kunnumkal
Sumit Kunnumkal