Abstract

This paper addresses a crucial issue in the airline industry by tackling a dynamic pricing problem in the presence of patient customers, a scenario that has gained significance due to the revenue loss of airlines caused by customers’ non-myopic decision-making. To effectively capture this non-myopic characteristic, we propose a Markov decision process (MDP) including a history of offered prices as a state variable. In contrast to previous studies, distributions of customers’ properties are assumed to be unknown in advance for a more realistic representation of real-world scenarios. To deal with the new challenges of the problem, we propose utilizing a specific learning framework (i.e., deep exploration-based RL) that is unexplored in this domain. The numerical experiments demonstrate that its performance can be improved on the MDP we designed and show that it outperforms the benchmark algorithm. The structures of pricing policies generated from the bootstrapped deep Q-network algorithm imply that airlines should offer high and low prices alternately from the beginning of the sales period rather than increasing prices as time goes on. We also ascertain that more frequent consecutive high-priced periods can increase airlines’ revenue in environments with higher customer patience levels.