Wait or buy? The strategic consumer: Pricing and profit implications

Using tools from operations research, airlines have, for many years, taken a strategic approach to pricing the seats available on a particular flight based on demand forecasts and information. The result of this approach is that the same seat on the same flight is often offered at different fares at different times. Setting of these prices using yield-management approaches is a major activity for many airlines and is well studied in the literature. However, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the existence of pricing strategies used by airlines. In addition, the availability of airline travel pricing on the Internet affords consumers the opportunity to behave more strategically when making purchase decisions. The onset of the information age makes it possible for an informed consumer or a third party, such as a travel agent, to obtain demand information similar to that used by the airlines. In particular, it is possible for consumers or travel agents to purchase historical data or to obtain it by monitoring the seats that are available at various prices for a given flight. If a consumer understands the pricing strategy and has access to demand information, he/she may decide to defer purchase of a ticket because they believe that a cheaper seat may yet become available. If consumers were to make use of this information to make such strategic purchasing decisions, what would be the impact on airline revenues? The purpose of this paper is to investigate these impacts. This work indicates that use of standard yield management approaches to pricing by airlines can result in significantly reduced revenues when buyers are using an informed and strategic approach to purchasing. Therefore, when airlines are setting or presenting prices, they should investigate the effect of strategic purchasing on their decisions.     

On the Flow-Shop Sequencing Problem with No Wait in Process<Superscript>†</Superscript>

The optimization problem of minimizing the completion time in flow-shop sequencing with an environment of no intermediate storage is considered. Application of this problem in computer systems is pointed out and techniques are developed to solve the problem.     

Ball,sphere, and all,all, all

The relationship of multidimensional geometry with statistical thermodynamics and with laws of large numbers is described.     

Kepler, Kugeln, Cluster, Katastrophen

Zusammenfassung. Dieser Überblick skizziert Theorie und Anwendungen von Kugelpackungen, ausgehend von den klassischen Problemen von Kepler und Newton. Der weitaus wichtigste Bereich der regelmäßigen, gitterförmigen Kugelpackungen einschließlich der Anwendungen auf Codes wird kurz gehalten, weil es dazu ausgiebig Literatur gibt. Dagegen wird ausführlicher auf die in den letzten Jahren stark entwickelten endlichen Kugelpackungen eingegangen, die gute Modelle für die in der Nanotechnik wichtigen Microcluster sind. In jeder der relativ knapp gehaltenen Sektionen wird das zum Verständnis Unerlässliche an Theorie angegeben, sowie mindestens ein überraschendes oder im Wortsinn merkwürdiges Phänomen. Außerdem wird auf weiterführende Literatur verwiesen. Für Einsteiger sei insbesondere M. Leppmeiers Buch [L] empfohlen.     

When is an L(B, m, n, r, s, t, z, w) loop SRAR?

In [5, 6], the second author and D. A. ROBINSON initiated a study of non-Moufang Bol loops with the property that over a field, necessarily of characteristic 2, their loop rings satisfy the right, but not the left, Bol identity. They called such loops SRAR and showed that the family of SRAR loops includes those Bol loops which have a unique non-identity commutator/associator. In [4, 2], the current authors presented a construction for a new class of Bol loops denoted L(B,m,n,r,s,t,z,w) with initial data a given (possibly associative) Bol loop B, elements, r, s, t, z and w in the centre of B, and integers m and n.     

Woodhouse, babbage, peacock, and modern Algebra

In a recent article, J. M. Dubbey [Historia Mathematica 4 (1977), 295–302] showed that George Peacock's A Treatise on Algebra (1830) was similar to an unpublished work written by Charles Babbage in 1821. Evidently perplexed about the absence of a dispute over priority, Dubbey concluded that Peacock had unconsciously assimilated Babbage's ideas, and that Babbage was too busy with other activities to be concerned. The thesis of this article is that the innovative aspects of the work of both Babbage and Peacock are extensions of ideas put forth in 1803 by Robert Woodhouse, and that probably neither Babbage nor Peacock was overly concerned with acknowledgments because their approach to algebra was not unique at Cambridge.     

A three-stage, VSVO, Hermite-Birkhoff-Taylor, ODE solver

The new variable-step, variable-order, ODE solver, HBT(p) of order p, presented in this paper, combines a three-stage Runge-Kutta method of order 3 with a Taylor series method of order p-2 to solve initial value problems , where y:R→R^d and f:R×R^d→R^d. The order conditions satisfied by HBT(p) are formulated and they lead to Vandermonde-type linear algebraic systems whose solutions are the coefficients in the formulae for HBT(p). A detailed formulation of variable-step HBT(p) in both fixed-order and variable-order modes is presented. The new method and the Taylor series method have similar regions of absolute stability. To obtain high-accuracy results at high order, this method has been implemented in multiple precision.