Correspondence: Laurie Garrow, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 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 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 the Gregory J. Owens Associate Professor in the College of Management and is the coordinator for the Pricing and Revenue Management Initiative at Georgia Tech. He served as co-chair of the conference featured in this article. He serves as a board member for the Pricing and Revenue Management subdivision of INFORMS and has consulted with a number of companies on price optimisation. Two of his papers have won best paper awards at the national Production and Operations Management conferences and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Before joining the faculty, he worked for five years as an engineer and inventory manager at IBM.

Received 11 January 2008; Revised 11 January 2008; Published online 22 February 2008.

Abstract

On 2nd–3rd October, 2007, the third annual Revenue Management and Price Optimization conference was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The conference explored how multiple factors, including fragmentation of customer markets, transparency in markets, and globalisation, have spurred a transformation from intuition-based to analytical-based decision making across many industries. Panellists included representatives from industries spanning airline, hotel, gaming, grocery, jewellery, package delivery, consumer goods, manufacturing, and consulting. This paper summarises key discussions that emerged from the conference and highlights success stories portrayed in keynote addresses given by James Whitehurst, former chief operating officer of Delta Air Lines; Rick Campana, vice president of Corporate Marketing of the United Parcel Service; and Chuck Neville, executive director of Finance of General Motors Service and Parts Operations.