Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 174069, 15 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/174069
Research Article

Dynamically Switching among Bundled and Single Tickets with Time-Dependent Demand Rates

Industrial Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey

Received 21 November 2011; Revised 5 March 2012; Accepted 12 March 2012

Academic Editor: Alexander Pogromsky

Copyright © 2012 Serhan Duran and Yusuf Kenan Pakyardım. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The most important market segmentation in sports and entertainment industry is the competition between customers that buy bundled and single tickets. A common selling practice is starting the selling season with bundled ticket sales and switching to selling single tickets later on. The aim of this practice is to increase the number of customers that buy bundles, which in return increases the load factor of the events with low demand. In this paper, we investigate the effect of time dependent demand on dynamic switching times from bundled to single ticket sales and the potential revenue gain over the case where the demand rate of events is assumed to be constant with time.