Revenue Management Forensics in Adriatic Wings

The new Director of Pricing and Revenue Management of a company that rents sailboats in Croatia needs to evaluate the effectiveness of their proprietary algorithm for pricing and capacity allocation. The issue is that the algorithm is, practically, a "black box" to her, i.e., she can observe and analyze its outcomes, but she does not have meaningful access to its inner workings. Consequently, she asks her analysts to put together figures and statistics that she used to worked with in prior positions she held in the airline industry: average price and capacity utilization data around the year; price dispersion as a function of the time to the trip; and capacity utilization across the network of locations that the company operates in. If she is to convince the top management of the company to devote significant time and resources in opening the "black box," she needs to find solid evidence in this data.