ANALYSIS ON SEATING UTILITY WHEN SEAT AVAILABILITY VARIES IN EACH TRAIN

On-line seat reservations via off-line seating arrangements

When reservations are made to for instance a train, it is an on-line problem to accept or reject, i.e., decide if a person can be fitted in given all earlier reservations. However, determining a seating arrangement, implying that it is safe to accept, is an off-line problem with the earlier reservations and the current one as input. We develop optimal algorithms to handle problems of this nature.

Tests of utility independence when health varies over time.

In the conventional quality adjusted life year (QALY) model, people's preferences are assumed to satisfy utility independence. When health varies over time, utility independence implies that the value attached to a health state is independent of the health state that arise before or after it. Two separate studies were conducted involving a total of 155 respondents. In study one, we conducted fi...

Foraging in Complex Environments: When Prey Availability Varies over Time and Space

An optimal foraging model is presented which combines simultaneous and nonsimultaneous modes of search for food. This model is more complex than those in the literature which are constructed using one search mode exclusively. Solutions to this foraging model lead to diets which are seldom composed of a single food or of foods in proportion to their abundance in the environment. Therefore, the m...

Tests of Utility Independence in the Qaly Model When Health Varies over Time: Two Experimental Studies

Dynamic Airline Pricing and Seat Availability

Airfares are determined by both intertemporal price discrimination and dynamic adjustment to stochastic demand. I estimate a model of dynamic airline pricing accounting for both forces with new flight-level data. With model estimates, I disentangle key interactions between the arrival pattern of consumer types and remaining capacity under stochastic demand. I show that the forces are complement...