Correspondence: Carrie C. Queenan, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA

¹is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. She has published revenue management research in such journals as Production and Operations Management and Interfaces. Carrie currently serves as the newsletter editor for the Pricing and Revenue Management subdivision of INFORMS. Before earning her PhD at Georgia Tech, Carrie worked in operations management for both Shell and Siemens.

²is the Steven A. Denning Professor of Technology and Management and the John and Wendi Wells Associate Professor of Operations Management in the College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has 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 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.

³is an Associate Professor in the Operations & Information Systems Department at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. He holds a PhD in Business Administration with a concentration in Operations Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. He has published in Production and Operations Management, the Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, R&D Management and Supply Chain & Logistics Journal.

Received 18 June 2009; Revised 18 June 2009; Published online 14 August 2009.

Abstract

Revenue Management (RM) is an important tool with well-accepted benefits and a rich analytical research stream. However, the research is missing a holistic examination that includes both the technical and social elements of effective RM. We propose nine drivers which contribute to effective RM and perform an empirical study to test these conjectures. More specifically, based on qualitative interviews and literature support, we develop a survey instrument tailored to the hotel industry to measure our constructs and apply both an objective and perceptual performance measure to determine the impact each of the nine elements has on RM performance. We find forecasting ability and organizational focus on RM both significantly positively impact RM performance, whether we measure RM performance either objectively or perceptually, providing evidence that both technical and social processes and structure impact RM.