Air cargo revenue management under buy-back policy

Abstract

Few researches address the application of financial “buy-back” concept in the air cargo revenue management. This paper examines the air cargo booking and execution procedure to measure the applicability of the buy-back policy in the air cargo revenue. By applying buy-back policy during the period of order release and order execution, a revenue model is built which incorporates Hellermann's capacity option model into the Black-Scholes pricing model. The results demonstrated that buy-back policy not only answers the questions of whether to buy-back, when to buy-back and how much to buy-back, but also increases the revenues of both asset provider and intermediary. Further study is extended in the overbooking and partial buy-back scenarios. The buy-back policy showed better performance in these two scenarios compared with current approach.