One of
the most popular articles in my blog is the one about the outcomes of a study that
we conducted in the University of Twente (NL) about the suspected price
discrimination of airlines in online sales using cookies.
In this sense a study of the
colleagues from Northeastern University (Hannak et.al, 2014) published in the IMC 2014 proceedings is a very much
welcome contribution to a topic that keeps most air travelers busy", namely whether airlines (or online travel agents) discriminate when they price their services to different customers.
The study called Measuring
Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites" looks to price
discrimination from a different perspective than ours with very interesting
results. The study is available here.
Despite the immense interest though,
the academic journals (even those specialized in air travel) do not seem
particularly interested in this kind of studies since they are conflicting with
many academic reviewers' mindsets. Some academics do not seem also to
understand what are the real topics of their study domain. The paper we wrote
following the study was accepted by the EMAC conference last year but rejected
by two journals as irrelevant.
In that respect I wish to congratulate
the colleagues from Northeastern for their very interesting article and
wish them more success than us with the publication of the study.
For those interested our EMAC
Conference the paper is available (email me at e.constantindes@utwente.nl).
Diercks
R., Constantinides E., 2014, Airline price discrimination: a practice of yield
management or
