Dynamic Discrete Choice Model for Railway Ticket Cancellation and Exchange Behavior

Ticket cancellation and exchange behavior is considered to be a crucial decision in revenue management problems. Good predictions in terms of cancellation and exchange rates enable carriers to manage efficiently overbooking and reduce the expected number of empty seats when there is demand for those seats. Behavior of ticket cancellation and exchange is clearly influenced by demand uncertainty over time. Existing literatures related to choice modeling in revenue management (RM) are mostly based on static models and ignore the effect of dynamics in consumer behavior. This project considers a railway revenue management problem in which the project explicitly model a passenger trip adjustment choice using a dynamic discrete choice framework, which specifies the probability of exchanging tickets as a function of a set of available alternatives. Based on concepts derived from dynamic programming, the project specifies a choice model that includes ticket cancellation and exchange settings. The project expects to be able to estimate a wide range of variable categories that identify passenger rescheduling behavior including cost, departure time, group size, refund policy, destination characteristics. Static and dynamic models' performances will also be evaluated on the basis of their ability to reproduce individual choices over time.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $63822.00
• Contract Numbers:

  DTRT12-G-UTC03

  UMD-2012-04

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Mid-Atlantic Universities Transportation Center

  Pennsylvania State University
  201 Transportation Research Building
  University Park, PA  United States  16802-4710
• Performing Organizations:

  University of Maryland, College Park

  College Park, MD  United States  20742
• Principal Investigators:

  Cirillo, Cinzia

• Start Date: 20120611
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20130531
• Source Data: RiP Project 31797

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Demand; Overbooking; Railroad transportation; Tickets; Travel behavior
• Uncontrolled Terms: Discrete choice models; Exchange; Late cancellations
• Subject Areas: Finance; Passenger Transportation; Railroads;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01467329
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Mid-Atlantic Universities Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: DTRT12-G-UTC03, UMD-2012-04
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 3:32PM