50 years of revenue management — A European perspective

Over the past 50 years, revenue management has developed from an innovation in the aviation industry to a must-have in many other industries. Simultaneously, research has spread globally. This field, situated at the interface of operations research and marketing, centrally aims to maximize profit by dynamically balancing supply and demand in environments with inflexible (or difficult-to-adjust) capacity and heterogeneous customer valuations. In contrast to most literature in this field, which typically emphasizes US-American trends such as platforms, ride-hailing, or digital ads, this review focuses on four areas of particular relevance in Europe: (i) sustainability, since Europe is widely recognized for its leadership in global sustainability efforts; (ii) incompletely specified products (also known as opaque selling and flexible products), which have apparently originated in Europe, most likely due to a long history of tourism and travel agencies in Europe; (iii) fairness, which is more deeply rooted in European legislation due to higher levels of consumer protection than in the US, and (iv) manufacturing, where digitization efforts have been championed by the European industry 4.0 movement. For each domain, we discuss its European relevance, quantify scholarly activity using our classification of 2901 RM papers, and synthesize the literature through subdomains and a unified building-block framework. We conclude by identifying research gaps shaped by Europe’s legal, institutional, and industrial context.