This book grew out of courses in pricing and revenue optimization developed at Columbia
University and Stanford University. 1 At the time there were few other comparable courses. 2
Since then, it has become clear that there is growing interest in pricing and revenue opti-
mization (a.k.a. revenue management and dynamic pricing) as a topic of study within both
business schools and management science/operations research departments. This interest
is quite understandable: Not only is pricing and revenue optimization an important appli-
cations arena for quantitative analysis, it has achieved widely publicized successes in many
industries, and there is growing interest in the techniques of pricing and revenue optimiza-
tion across many different industries. Some of the issues involved in developing and teach-
ing an MBA course in pricing and revenue optimization have been treated in articles by
Peter Bell (2004) and myself (Phillips 2004).
1