One approach for increasing the revenue of railway undertakings is to adopt yield management techniques, by setting quotas for discount ticket sales of reserved seats on express trains. We developed a method to calculate the optimum sales quota, incorporating estimations for the demand of various discount tickets and purchase behavior of passengers with the next-best-option when they were not able to buy their desired ticket. We conducted a trial sale by applying the calculated sales quota into the actual seat reservation system and confirmed that the method can increase revenues and facilitate decision-making for setting sales quotas.
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