Garrett J. van Ryzin

The 2016 INFORMS IMPACT PRIZE is awarded to Peter Belobaba, E. Andrew Boyd, Tom Cook, Guillermo Gallego, Robert Phillips, Barry C. Smith, Kalyan Talluri and Garrett van Ryzin for contributions in revenue management.

Revenue management is the theory and practice of dynamically managing the price and availability of a portfolio of products or services to maximize profitability. Revenue Management was famously first developed to enable airlines to manage the prices and availability of their seat inventory following deregulation in 1978. During the 1980’s it spread from the airlines to other capacity-constrained service industries such as hotels, rental cars, and cruise lines. From the 1990’s through today it has become a mainstream business practice across a wide range of industries including not only airlines and hotels but also freight transportation, media, retailing, entertainment, consumer finance, and manufacturing. As the internet and the information economy has grown, revenue management has become even more critical to many businesses including Amazon, Airbnb, Google, Microsoft and UBER.

From its earliest days, the field of revenue management has been characterized by an active interchange between industry and academia. Revenue management has proven to be a deep and enduring topic for research. There are two specialty journals devoted the field of revenue management, as well as a Pricing and Revenue Management Section of INFORMS and an INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Conference which is attended by more than 100 practitioners and academics each year. Furthermore, academic research has resulted in approaches and algorithms that are routinely used to improve revenue-management systems used in industry that deliver additional revenues to companies while enabling access of scarce resources to customers.

For their pivotal role in the creation and wide-spread adoption of revenue management, INFORMS is pleased to award the 2016 Impact Prize to Peter Belobaba, E. Andrew Boyd, Tom Cook, Guillermo Gallego, Robert Phillips, Barry C. Smith, Kalyan Talluri, and Garrett van Ryzin.

The Lanchester Prize for 2005 is awarded to Kalyan T. Talluri and Garrett J. van Ryzin for The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, Mass., 2004.

Revenue management represents both one of OR/MS’s greatest achievements over the past two decades and one of the most fertile areas for future research, application development, and practical impact. While interest in the area has grown rapidly, researchers and practitioners have had to struggle with integrating a diverse array of sources without a common organizational structure for defining issues and results – until now. In this book, Talluri and van Ryzin provide the first comprehensive treatment of the theory and practice of revenue management and build an organizational framework for the field that defines both critical implementation questions and mathematical challenges. Practitioners can rapidly assimilate the key steps in building a revenue management system, while researchers can learn the basis for existing results as well as the promising new areas to explore.

Besides introducing an illuminating structure to the field, Talluri and van Ryzin uncover multiple new application arenas beyond traditional airline revenue management. They also develop a new view of the field’s relationship to economic and behavioral theory that bridges academic disciplines and represents even broader opportunities for innovative research. With such deep insight into theory and practice, Talluri and van Ryzin’s book has already become a standard in both academics and industry. The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management truly exemplifies the best of operations research and the management sciences.