=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2105/10000046
|storemode=property
|title=Recognition of Price Discrimination in the Online Sale of Airline Tickets
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2105/10000046.pdf
|volume=Vol-2105
|authors=Galyna Chornous,Iuliia Iarmolenko
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icteri/ChornousI18
}}
==Recognition of Price Discrimination in the Online Sale of Airline Tickets==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2105/10000046.pdf
Recognition of Price Discrimination in the Online Sale of
Airline Tickets
Galyna O. Chornous, Iuliia A. Iarmolenko
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Faculty of Economics, Department of Econom-
ic Cybernetics, Vasylkivska str. 90a, Kyiv 03022, Ukraine
chornous@univ.kiev.ua, yu.yarmolenko@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper deals with the recognition of price discrimination types in
the online sale of tickets by Ukrainian airline companies. A set of technical
tools, such as VPN, are used to create different user profiles in order to test sev-
eral hypotheses on user features, which can make companies set different prices
for similar tickets. A set of hypotheses is taken from already existing researches
on price discrimination. Moreover, a new hypothesis about price discrimination
based on geographical location of a customer will be tested.
Keywords: Price discrimination, dynamic pricing, VPN, airline industry.
1 Introduction
The use of dynamic pricing by companies is not a secret for customers for already
many years. Industries that have high fixed costs widely use the approach of dynamic
pricing in order to stay profitable. Usually, customers do not perceive this approach
negatively, unless it refers to the use of personal information to establish different
prices to people based on user profiling. A classic example of an industry that has
high fixed costs and uses dynamic pricing on regular basis is the passenger airline
industry. Since the costs spend on one flight do not depend much on the number of
passengers but on fuel price and airport service costs, airline companies try to sell
tickets for the highest possible price corresponding to the current demand. Based on
many factors, such as time left to the departure, seasonal demand, the popularity of
direction and other, airline companies set prices dynamically, usually the same for all
users. Thus, companies provide sales for the highest price, so that the supply of seats
in a plane is fully covered. However, many studies have shown that apart from using
dynamic pricing synchronically users can become “victims” of the use of personal
profiling information. It can be the case of price reduction for a person, who does not
want to buy a ticket for its regular price. However, usually, it means that the price can
be higher due to a detected ability to pay more.
Current research is dedicated to experimental testing and recognition of personal
price discrimination in the online sale of Ukrainian airline companies’ tickets. The
main goal of this study is to test several hypotheses on approaches that Ukrainian
companies use for dynamic pricing. We want to make an emphasis on the aspects,
which let us make conclusions on the use of personal profiling features while pricing.
In case of the presence, we will be able to claim that Ukrainian airline companies do
discriminate their customers based on personal features. In order to do so a set of
tasks has to be completed:
1. Examine recent studies of dynamic pricing in the airline industry and allocate those
examples, which refer to discrimination based on personal characteristics of a cus-
tomer.
2. Make an overview of dynamic pricing software presented on the market.
3. Select Ukrainian airline companies, which make regular flights, to take part in the
research.
4. Suggest some more hypotheses on features, which possibly can cause the use of
personal pricing discrimination towards a specific profile.
5. Create fictive user profiles having specific features in order to test whether prices
are sensitive to the profile differences.
6. Create experiments specification for testing hypotheses. Collect data on airline
ticket prices under different profiles.
7. Analyze results and check different types of hypothesis about profiling features
significant for dynamic pricing.
By solving these issues we will be able to detect approaches used by Ukrainian
airline industry for dynamic pricing and compare methods with those, recognized in
other studies of foreign companies. Thus, a conclusion about the presence or absence
of personal price discrimination will be made.
The creation of several user profiles became significantly easier and affordable
due to the drop in prices of VPN services. In turn, there is no need for a big amount of
different devices or Internet access points in order to simulate "different people".
Moreover, this study is the first academic one to deal with the personal dynamic pric-
ing issue for Ukrainian airline companies.
The results of this study will be possible to use by both companies and their cus-
tomers, however making an opposition between them. After becoming familiar with
the results, companies will become aware of the methods their competitors use and
those – presented in foreign business models. In their turn, customers will get more
information for better decision-making. In case personal discrimination methods are
used, they will gain tools to control pricing towards them based on ICT.
2 Personal Price Discrimination and ICT for Dynamic Pricing
Strategies Support in Recent Studies
In this part, a review of studies, dedicated to testing of different hypotheses on per-
sonal price discrimination, will be made. Such issues as pricing based on days left to
the flight or other factors, which is a reason to update prices for all users at a time,
will be omitted here since they do not refer to pricing based on profiling. First, some
examples of indirect profile discrimination will be given, further, we will move to-
wards direct profile price discrimination.
One of the main price discrimination strategies that are used by companies is a so-
called implicit segmentation [1] when the price of a round trip depends on the dura-
tion of stay (amount of time between the direct and return flights). This type of dis-
crimination is rather indirect because anyone can check the price for a round trip with
a different gap in time. However, from the point of human logic, a short flight seems
to be a business trip or other urgent issue, which has to be solved on a specific time,
while longer trips are supposed to be leisure ones. And this logic can be used in dy-
namic pricing algorithm to sell tickets with a higher price. According to [1], a price
difference of 50% could have been observed for KLM company tickets prices in favor
of long-term travelers compared to short-term.
Another example of indirect price discrimination is higher ticket prices for those,
who scan websites on weekends rather than on working days. According to [17], peo-
ple were offered in average 5% lower prices on weekends compared to working days.
“This conjecture is supported by the finding that the weekend purchase effect is dis-
tinctly larger on routes with a mixture of both business and leisure customers than on
routes that disproportionately serve leisure customers” [17].
One of the most popular and used for a long time approaches in dynamic pricing is
a Saturday-night stay-over requirement for price discrimination. Concerning, that
business trips usually take place on working days and busy people want to get home
before the following weekend, there is a usual assumption that busy people do not
leave for weekends, while those who have holiday trips can stay on weekends. Since
the second group has a lower elasticity of demand, it is frequently offered tickets for
lower prices. The research [20] showed a negative significant correlation between
price of tickets and cases of covering weekend days during a trip. The very same re-
sult of a significant drop in price for Saturday-night stay-over trips was shown in the
research [10].
Now let us move to the cases and assumptions of direct personal price discrimina-
tion in the sale of airline tickets. The research [6] concludes that customer browsing
history and behavior on Internet causes price differences from one profile to another.
An earlier study emphasized that customers are aware of the fact that their Internet
profile can be used for dynamic pricing and individual price targeting [2]. Moreover,
another study [11] showed that customers feel treated more fairly when they are of-
fered different prices based on purchase characteristics rather than on their behavior
and browser cookies history.
One of the features that can be taken from the browser cookies is whether a user
has previously visited a mediator website in order to find suitable fares. If so, then a
further direct visit to a company website can be impacted by the previous action. The
fact of possible price change in the airline industry was not checked itself, however,
the research about pricing on the Internet [8] showed, that such a strategy is widely
used in e-commerce and online sales. The hypothesis to check in this research is a
decrease in a price of tickets after visiting a mediator website.
Here is the list of top discrimination types detected by researchers at different stud-
ies referring to airline tickets sale and pricing on the Internet. All these direct and
indirect types of discrimination by the user profiling will be tested in the main part of
this paper on Ukrainian airline companies.
Now let us consider those technologies standing behind dynamic pricing strategies.
The need for dynamic pricing is not a whim of companies. It has become the norm for
many service industries – especially in today’s volatile markets. Due to the intensifi-
cation of competition in the markets, companies should care about a proper pricing
strategy. Information now is more available than ever before, that is why an average
customer became significantly aware of prices on market, competitive advantages of
companies. “How you price your product could make or break your business. Price
too high and you’ll likely lose to the competition. Price too low and you’ll degrade
the value of your goods and services. Price just right, and you’ve put yourself in
prime position to win the sale. Bottom line: you need a strong, sound, and proactive
strategy to come out on top” [13].
The main reason for the rapid development of pricing strategies its and continuing
improvement is the new sources of information. “Technological advancements are
giving airlines access to more information about the characteristics of their custom-
ers” [4]. Implementation of a dynamic pricing strategy and revenue optimization in
today’s information world is gained by the use of up-to-date ICTs, recent methods of
artificial intelligence, such as neural networks and reinforcement learning, and nature-
oriented optimization methods, such as genetic algorithms and simulated annealing.
These methods are being developed constantly and specialists apply them to alloca-
tion processes in distributed IT-infrastructures, or grid systems [7, 16, 19].
Currently, several dozens of specialized software, both web-based and desktop, can
be found. These products provide a different kind of analytics in addition to pricing
strategies. They are channel analysis, competitor product analysis, market analysis,
pricing analytics etc. According to Capterra ranking of the highest rated products,1 the
top three dynamic pricing software products are Prisync, Seller Republic, and
Skuuudle. Another ranking set by G2 Crowd gives first three places to aPriori, En-
deavorCPQ, Verenia CPQ. If we consider a company's size, the best products for big
enterprises are KBMax3D CPQ, aPriori Product Cost Management, and Zilliant IQ.
For mid-market companies, G2 Crowd recommends EndeavorCPQ, Verenia CPQ and
KBMax3D CPQ. EndeavorCPQ is proposed for small business as well. 2
According to the interview with 7 dynamic pricing software specialists on Quora, it
is obvious that the use of simple business rules without analysis of specific data is a
poor game. All of them agree with the opinion that big data needed for machine learn-
ing and deriving pricing rules is the core of an effective strategy. They also make an
emphasis on the need for quality data that should be used for learning, since the effec-
tiveness of pricing highly correlates with it. However, a reasonable approach for
choosing software products was proposed by a pricing consultant Kapil Muley. He
insists on building custom models for any kind of company in order to correspond to
the specifics of the company industry.3
1 https://www.capterra.com/pricing-optimization-software/
?utf8=%E2%9C%93&users=&sort_options=Highest+Rated
2 https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/pricing
3 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-software-for-fully-automated-dynamic-pricing-in-
e-commerce
3 Ukrainian Passenger Airline Industry
In this part, we are going to make a review of Ukrainian companies, which carry out
regular passenger flights. Today only 4 airline companies deal with regular flights and
have their own Internet platforms for selling tickets online. After "Aerosvit” company
went bankrupt in 2012, “Ukrainian International Airlines” became an actual monopo-
ly-company and still being so far. Here is the list of companies whose pricing ap-
proaches will be analyzed in this work:
1. Ukrainian International Airlines – a strategic Ukrainian company, which carries
out most of the international flights from Ukraine. The company is based at Boryspil
International Airport. “Ukraine International offers a vast selection of point-to-point
and transit travel opportunities. The airline connects Ukraine with 38 countries in
Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and the Middle East. The carrier operates 1100 inter-
national and domestic flights weekly and provides connections with partner airlines’
services to over 3000 destinations worldwide” 4.
2. “Motor Sich Airlines” – a unit of the Public Joint Stock Company Motor Sich, a
successful and leading company, which develops and manufactures aircraft and heli-
copter engines. The company is based in Zaporizhzhya International Airport. “Nowa-
days the Airline has a fleet of nine aircrafts, operating regular passenger domestic and
international flights, passenger and cargo charter flights and special flights, ensuring
operation of the parent company”.5
3. “Atlasjet” – a subsidiary company of Turkish “Atlasglobal”, was licensed only a
few years ago, in 2015. “Atlasglobal performs regular international flights from Lvov,
Kharkov, and Zaporozhye to Ataturk airport in Istanbul, from Istanbul – to the cities
of Turkey, Northern Cyprus, Europe, Russia, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle
East".6 Ukrainian subsidiary is based in Lviv Danylo Halytskyi International Airport.
4. “Yanair” – another young airline company, based in Kyiv International Airport
(Zhuliany). The company carries out both regular and charter flights, the regular ones
have destinations in Georgia and Israel. Apart from passenger air travel, the company
implements an investment program into Zhytomyr Airport.7
It is worth noting that the companies mentioned above have a very different market
position, since "Ukraine International Airlines" seems to be a monopoly-company and
has the biggest market share. Formally, the company is not recognized as a monopo-
list in Ukraine, since “market” in the airline industry is defined as the set of flights on
the respective route. Thus, formally a monopolist should occupy all the routes from
the country. According to the Ministry of Infrastructure of Ukraine, the number of
transported passengers by “Ukraine International Airlines” during the first three quar-
ters in 2017 was 20% higher than during the similar period in 2016.8 “Ukraine Inter-
national Airlines” has overall transported nearly 7 million of passengers during the
4 https://www.flyuia.com/ua/en/about/uia-about
5 https://www.flymotorsich.com/en/pages/company
6 http://www.atlasglb.com.ua/about-us/
7 http://yanair.ua/company.html
8 https://mtu.gov.ua/content/statistichni-dani-v-galuzi-aviatransportu.html
previous year,9 which is about 68% of 10.55 million people transported by Ukrainian
airline companies in 2017.10 Considering this, we percept “Ukraine International Air-
lines” as a monopolist of the industry.
4 User Profile Simulation and Significant Features Detection
Methodology
This part contains specifications of several experiments conducted in the framework
of this study. In general, we expect to recognize some cases of the third-degree price
discrimination, which implies customer segmentation in order to sell tickets for dif-
ferent prices. The worst possible case we should expect to recognize is the first-
degree price discrimination, which means selling tickets for the highest acceptable by
a certain customer price. However, only a monopolist can afford using such technique
for pricing. First of all, let us define the hypotheses we want to test. Besides what was
mentioned in the previous studies part, there are several more hypotheses to add,
which mostly refer to personal profiling features of a user. Here is the final list of ten
hypotheses to check (Table 1), including an explanation of why these features are
important to test. Assumptions on the possible impact of these features on tickets’
price can be found as well.
Table 1. Hypotheses on user features, which can be used for discrimination while dynamic
pricing
Discriminated Direct or indi- Why this feature is Hypotheses to test
# feature rect discrimi- important
nation type
Saturday- Indirect Business trips, Round trips that over-
1 night stay- which are more lap weekend days are
over price elastic, are cheaper
not supposed to
occur on weekends
9 https://www.flyuia.com/ua/ua/news/2018/uia-performace
10 http://cfts.org.ua/news/2018/01/16/
ukrainskie_aviakompanii_uvelichili_passazhiropotok_na_275_v_2017_godu_45009
Discriminated Direct or indi- Why this feature is Hypotheses to test
# feature rect discrimi- important
nation type
A user has Direct Since a person has Round trip is more
2 previously some fixed plans, expensive after a hotel
booked a he or she is less has been booked
hotel price sensitive
Geographic Direct People from all Users from developed
3 location over the world countries will be of-
have different fi- fered higher prices than
nancial opportuni- those from developing
ties, proportional ones
to the incomes of
the country's popu-
lation
Cookies and Direct Since a company Depending on the
4 general can reconstruct browser history, people
search history more precise pro- can be offered both
left in a files of people, lower or higher prices
browser they will be of- compared to „cold“
fered prices fitting (newcomers without
their behavior information collected)
users
Other com- Direct A company can Depending on the pric-
5 pany same vary prices de- es offered by previous
direction pending on the search result of the
previous knowledge of a same direction, cross-
search user about prices price elasticity may
offered by compet- vary
itors
Previous Direct A company can Prices increase after an
6 unfinished create an impres- unfinished attempt to
attempt to sion of urgency to buy tickets
buy tickets make a quick deci-
sion before prices
have changed
again
Duration of Indirect Business travelers, The longer the round
7 the stay who are less price trip – the less is the
sensitive, and lei- price
sure travelers dif-
fer in the length of
a trip
Discriminated Direct or indi- Why this feature is Hypotheses to test
# feature rect discrimi- important
nation type
Day of week Indirect People who buy Prices go lower on
8 to purchase tickets on week- weekends
tickets ends are more
price sensitive
Direct web- Direct Companies create Companies can offer a
9 site visit or a feeling of urgen- lower price than the
previous cy to buy a ticket very same company’s
mediator on a direct website route on the mediator
website visit since price here is website
lower
Device type Direct The type of device Customers browsing
10 a person uses cor- the internet from ex-
relates with finan- pensive devices will be
cial opportunities offered higher prices
An approach used in this study for testing hypotheses includes creating several fic-
tive user profiles and conducting A/B testing. An important condition for correct cal-
culations is to isolate the impact of other user factors for each tested feature. Hypothe-
ses about indirect price discrimination types do not need A/B testing since they are
not supposed to depend on user profiling features.
For this study, several fictive customer proflies were created. This is possible due
to the use of virtual private network (VPN) service, namely IVPN,11 that gives an
opportunity to go to a website using a mediator server. Thus 6 different browsers on
different devices were used, plus servers around the world mediated them. Here is the
list of profiles used for the experiment:
Table 2. Devices used for the experiment
# Browser Cookies history Servers Platform
1 Mozilla Cleared Paris, Toronto, Windows
Hong Kong
2 Google Cleared Madrid OS X
Chrome
3 Safari Not cleared - iOS
4 Safari Not cleared Bucharest OS X
5 Google Not cleared Milan Windows
Chrome
6 Google Cleared Frankfurt iOS
Chrome
11 https://www.ivpn.net/
Now we need to specify experiments for testing hypotheses from Table 1. It is im-
portant to make sure that metrics in the A\B test are isolated from the impact of other
factors (or at least this impact is not significant).
Table 3. Experiments specification and explanation
Exp. #, name Control metric Platform, Test metric Platform,
browser, browser,
server server
1. Saturday- Round trip Windows Round trip price Windows
night stay- price (trip does Mozilla (trip includes Mozilla
over not weekend) No cookies weekend) divid- No cookies
divided by the Paris ed by the sum of Paris
sum of one-way one-way com-
component ponent flights
flights
2. Previously Round trip Windows Round trip after Windows
booked a before booking Mozilla booking a hotel Chrome
hotel a hotel No cookies Cookies
Paris Milan
3. Geograph- One way trip Windows One way trip Windows
ic location Mozilla from other serv- Mozilla
No cookies ers No cookies
Paris Toronto &
Hong Kong
4. Cookies One way trip iOS One way trip iOS
and general Chrome Safari
search histo- No cookies Cookies
ry left in a Frankfurt Kiev
browser
5. Other One way trip iOS Check same iOS
company Chrome direction price Safari
same direc- No cookies on different Cookies
tion previous Frankfurt airline company Kiev
search website, then
check the one-
way trip price
6. Previous Roundtrip OS X Round trip, after OS X
unfinished Safari previous attempt Safari
attempt to Cookies to book on the Cookies
buy tickets Bucharest same device Bucharest
Exp. #, Control metric Platform, Test metric Platform,
name browser, server browser,
server
7. Duration 3 pairs of sepa- Windows Round trip, try Windows
of the stay rate round-trip Mozilla three different Mozilla
flight compo- No cookies timeframes: up No cookies
nents, try three Paris to 3 days, nearly Paris
different a week, more
timeframes: up than 10 days.
to 3 days, near- Check the sum
ly a week, more divided by the
than 10 days sum of one-way
component
flights
8. Day of Round trip Windows The same round Windows
week to price on a Mozilla trip price on the Mozilla
purchase working day No cookies weekend, then No cookies
tickets Paris again on work- Paris
ing day
9. Direct One way trip iOS Check same iOS
website Chrome direction price Safari
visit or No cookies on mediator Cookies
previous Frankfurt website, then Kiev
mediator check the price
website on the direct
visit website
10. Device Roundtrip Windows Compare with iOS / OS X
type (plat- Mozilla the same search No cookies
form) No cookies on other devices
Paris
Let us bring some understanding of testing hypotheses about indirect price discrim-
ination. As it was shown in the specification of #1 experiment about Saturday-night
stay-over, we aim to check, how price of the round trip differs from the total price of
two separate tickets as if they were bought separately. For example, as for January
17th, the price of the race Kyiv-Vienna conducting on February 6th by Ukraine Inter-
national Airlines was 6439 UAH. The return flight from Vienna to Kyiv on February
9th cost 7073 UAH. However, if we buy the respective round trip in one cheque, the
two tickets would cost 7256 UAH, meaning, that the discount for buying them is
around 46%.
While collecting routes data for the statistics, we tried to select quite similar trips.
In the case of experiment # 1, the round trips compared should have the same time of
stay and nearly the same price. This can prevent from the impact of undesirable fac-
tors on the experiments.
5 Results and Discussions
During this research, we have collected 920 flight price observations (later grouped
into 400 test cases), established by Ukrainian airline companies. These were both one-
way ticket prices and round-trip prices. For the purpose of creating 6 different fictive
profiles, we have used only 2 devices: iPhone 6s and MacBook Pro Retina 2015.
Fig. 1. A scheme of changing IP address in cookies while using VPN.
A virtual Windows machine was created on Macbook using VirtualBox and offi-
cial 3-month trail Windows distributive for virtual machines. Thanks to the use of
IVPN service we could use 6 different servers from cities of different continents (Par-
is, Madrid, Frankfurt, Milan, Hong Kong, Toronto) to use IP addresses, which helped
with imitating 6 different people. In Figure 1 a scheme with an example of VPN ser-
vice use is explained.
After collecting data, which might theoretically belong to different people, we ana-
lyzed the results in order to recognize those cases, which prove the use of price dis-
crimination based on indirect factors and direct user profile features. The results are
presented in Table 4. By “proving” cases we mean those ones that can be associated
with a certain hypothesis acceptance, while “neutral” cases – with rejection.
Table 4. Experiments’ specification and explanation
Company Hypothesis tested # of proving # of neutral
cases cases
Ukraine 1. Saturday-night stay-over 5 5
International 2. Previously booked a hotel 1 9
Airlines 3. Geographic location 0 10
4. Cookies and general search his- 0 10
tory left in a browser
5. Other company same direction 0 10
previous search
6. Previous unfinished attempt to 0 10
buy tickets
7. Duration of the stay 3 7
8. Day of week to purchase tickets 0 10
9. Direct website visit or previous 0 10
mediator website visit
10. Device type (platform) 0 10
Motor 1. Saturday-night stay-over 2 8
Sich 2. Previously booked a hotel 0 10
Airlines 3. Geographic location 0 10
4. Cookies and general search his- 0 10
tory left in a browser
5. Other company same direction 0 10
previous search
6. Previous unfinished attempt to 0 10
buy tickets
7. Duration of the stay 4 6
8. Day of week to purchase tickets 1 9
9. Direct website visit or previous 0 10
mediator website visit
10. Device type (platform) 0 10
Atlasjet 1. Saturday-night stay-over 6 4
2. Previously booked a hotel 0 10
3. Geographic location 0 10
4. Cookies and general search his- 0 10
tory left in a browser
5. Other company same direction 0 10
previous search
6. Previous unfinished attempt to 0 10
buy tickets
7. Duration of the stay 5 5
8. Day of week to purchase tickets 0 10
Company Hypothesis tested # of proving # of neutral
cases cases
Atlasjet 9. Direct website visit or previous 0 10
mediator website visit
10. Device type (platform) 0 10
Yanair 1. Saturday-night stay-over 0 10
2. Previously booked a hotel 0 10
3. Geographic location 0 10
4. Cookies and general search his- 0 10
tory left in a browser
5. Other company same direction 0 10
previous search
6. Previous unfinished attempt to 0 10
buy tickets
7. Duration of the stay 3 7
8. Day of week to purchase tickets 0 10
9. Direct website visit or previous 0 10
mediator website visit
10. Device type (platform) 0 10
Concluding from the results, reflected in Table 4, we cannot prove any kind of
direct personal discrimination by Ukrainian companies while selling tickets online.
This means, that our possible believes about airline companies (at least in Ukraine),
who might use our personal information to manipulate prices, are groundless. Another
situation we have with indirect personal price discrimination. We saw some cases
when a price for the round trip can vary depending on Saturday-night stay-over and
the length of a trip planned. However, these experiments can have other impacting
factors, which were not taken into consideration. For example, it seems that prices are
less likely to have big discounts for round trips as soon as time till departure decreas-
es.
It is worth noting, that the results on direct discrimination type are quite significant
to consider them as the disapproval of personal price discrimination used by Ukraini-
an airline companies.
6 Conclusions
The conducted research leads to several conclusions. The first and the most important
conclusion refers to the issue of personal price discrimination while selling tickets by
airline companies. No significant proves of using personal information from cookies
by Ukrainian airline companies have been found. Moreover, one of the provoking
hypotheses that geographic location of a customer has an impact on tickets price was
refuted. This entails the next set of conclusions for online tickets sale by Ukrainian
airline companies:
Previous browsing history of a user has no evidence of influencing ticket prices.
The fact, that a user has already booked a hotel, does not affect the trip price.
Geographic location of a user does not influence ticket prices.
A fact that a user has checked competitors’ prices on the same route has no impact
on ticket prices, the same with mediator websites.
Previous unfinished attempt to book tickets does not entail price increase.
The type of device a customer uses to check ticket prices does not affect prices
themselves.
Another piece of conclusions made during the research is that there is no direct ev-
idence of using price discrimination based on so-called “indirect” user profile fea-
tures, such as duration of stay, week of purchase and Saturday-night stay-over effect.
However, these hypotheses need further research in case of interest towards these
issues.
In this study, the authors have shown, how available tools can be used for checking
price discrimination hypotheses for any kind of online sale platform. The main idea of
this method is that VPN services can be used to create fictive user profiles. What is
most important is that they would differ by IP address and geographic location respec-
tively.
Several recommendations for customers to avoid price discrimination can be made
based on the research and previous studies in the field. Browsing history and Internet
footprint can be used for establishing prices dynamically based on browser cookies. It
is reasonable to check the same item price from a browser with cookies used, and
from a clear browser as well. It will not be superfluous to analyze your previous ac-
tions in a browser and how they can affect prices. Also, VPN services can be used for
browsing websites as a specific country's resident. The authors of this work call cus-
tomers for smart use of browser cookies and private browsing.
On the other hand, price discrimination is an approach for companies to expand
markets and make extra profits. Using up-to-date information technologies is an op-
portunity for new selling approaches and dynamic pricing in general. Companies are
getting new opportunities for wider price diversification and more effective extraction
of customer surplus. This became possible due to the use of ICT for studying con-
sumer preferences and behavior.
The absence of price discrimination detected while studying Ukrainian airline
companies is not an unequivocal indicator of ethics. It rather shows that the compa-
nies are lacking ICT tools for dynamic pricing, which are unlikely used often in
online pricing worldwide.
Thus, an important factor for increasing Ukrainian companies' competitiveness is
their ability for discovering and using knowledge from all possible sources of infor-
mation. Using dynamic pricing strategy is not a new concept, however still being
possible with enough data and technologies. That is why Ukrainian airline companies
should use a broader range of ICT in order to keep being competitive and increase
efficiency.
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