Correspondence: Laurie Garrow, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322-0355, USA. Tel: +1 404 385 6634; Fax: +1 404 894 2278; E-mail: laurie.garrow@ce.gatech.edu

¹Laurie Garrow
is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research interests include travel behaviour modelling and development of advanced discrete choice models. She currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the Urban Transportation Special Interest Group of INFORMS and co-chair of the AGIFORS Scheduling and Strategic Planning Group. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked for five years in the research and development revenue management group for United Airlines and for one year in customer science at Mercer Management Consulting.

²Mark Ferguson
is an Assistant Professor in the College of Management and coordinator for the Pricing and Revenue Management Initiative at Georgia Tech. He served as a board member for the Pricing and Revenue Management subdivision of INFORMS and has consulted with a number of companies on price optimization. Two of his papers have won best paper awards at POM conferences. Before joining the faculty, he worked for five years as an inventory manager at IBM.

³Pinar Keskinocak
is an Associate Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She has published several scholarly papers on pricing and lead time decisions including a review article that appeared in Management Science. She served as the cluster-chair for the Supply Chain Management and the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management tracks at INFORMS. Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received the NSF Career Award in 2001 and the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Operations Research Practice in 1998.

⁴Julie Swann
is an Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. In addition to her university experience, she participated in several research projects at General Motors and IBM, focusing on pricing in different industries. She is currently focused on the modelling and analysis of problems in supply chain management and revenue management. Other research interests include applications of economics and optimization to healthcare policy. She received the Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Council of Logistics Management in 2002 and an NSF Career Award in 2004.

Received 13 June 2006.

Abstract

On May 18, 2006, the second annual Revenue Management and Price Optimization conference was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The theme of the conference was on how the Internet is changing traditional revenue management and pricing practices. The conference brought together experts and thought leaders from more than 30 companies spanning airlines, hotels, car rentals, cruise lines, apartment rentals, aircraft manufacturing, retailing, distribution, e-mail marketing, on-line travel, logistics, sports, performing arts, software providers, and others. This paper summarises the key discussions from this conference and synthesises experts' perspectives on near-term opportunities and challenges facing their industries.