Correspondence: Luz A. Caudillo-Fuentes, Revenue Management, Walt Disney World Company, Orlando, Florida, USA. E-mail: FUENTESL@UMICH.EDU

¹currently works as an Operations Research Analyst in the Decision Science team of Revenue Management at Walt Disney World. She holds a Master's degree in Economics from El Colegio de México and a Master's degree in Financial Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. At this university, she is also a PhD candidate in Industrial and Operations Engineering, with a concentration area in Operations Research. In addition to her academic experience, she has worked as an Economics Analyst at the Energy Regulatory Commission, a Mexican government entity. She has taught classes in the decision analysis and financial engineering areas, and conducted research on managing financial risks on the supply chain.

²is an Operations Research Manager at Walt Disney World. He holds a PhD degree in Management Science from the University of Montreal and has 25 years of experience in Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), focusing on column generation and large-scale scheduling problems for the transportation industry. He worked on MIP problems for the airline industry for 7 years.

Received 12 August 2009; Revised 12 August 2009; Published online 9 October 2009.

Abstract

During economic downturns, demand is lower and market prices tend to decrease. However, large and non-systematic discounting can hurt a business in the short and long term. Revenue management can be helpful in coping with the adverse economic situation, as long as the company takes sufficient time to understand new markets or develop new products, finds creative ways to measure risk exposure, emphasizes transparency to customers and relies on experienced managers who can oversee the quality of automated revenue systems.