200. A Willingness To Purchase (WTP) based Dynamic Pricing of Tatkal Tickets in Indian Railways
Invited abstract in session TD-23: Data Analytics for Business Resilience and Sustainability - Leveraging ML Models, stream OR for Societal Development.
Tuesday, 14:30-16:00Room: Esther Simpson 3.01
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Sundaravalli Narayanaswami
|
| IIM Ahmedabad |
Abstract
Indian Railways (IR) has always been central to the travel journeys of the million Indians for commuting across the country. However, with the rising urbanization and increase in disposable income, the preference for travel mode has been shifting towards the airways especially in the tier 1 and tier 2 cities. Despite being a monopoly in railway traffic, alternate modes such as airways and roadways are huge business threats for IR (state owned and operated National Railway carrier), as people now often choose airways over railways even it means to pay a higher price for the relatively very short travel time in case of air travel. Tatkal (Just-in-time or Current booking) services is a booking service in IR, where passengers are allowed to book at a premium pricing on the travel day. As of now, the structure adopted in tatkal pricing is somewhat loosely defined; in this paper, we present a scientific model to deduce the tatkal pricing of a service, by using the Willing-to purchase (WTP) factor of a passenger, in presence of a competitive alternate mode of travel, which is airways.
Keywords
- Behavioural OR
- OR/MS and the Public Sector
- Transportation
Status: accepted
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