Revenue management: Practice, adoption, and impact

Abstract

Improving profitability is of critical importance to almost all organisations, requiring interlocking decisions which affect revenue and cost. Revenue management and management accounting provide a set of concepts and techniques to inform these areas. However, to date, research in these disciplines has focused on individual techniques within a narrow range of business settings, often focusing on either revenue or cost. This has led to a fragmented perspective of the practices which businesses undertake to improve profitability, how business settings affect adoption of these practices, and the diverse impact of practices on revenue and cost. This thesis provides an integrated examination of revenue management practice, adoption, and impact as well as the drivers of revenue and cost. A two-phase mixed methods approach is used. Phase one comprises fieldwork at seven organisations to examine the activities and techniques businesses use to make profit-focused decisions. This qualitative evidence is used for theory development for testing in phase two, which comprises a survey of New Zealand businesses. This thesis provides a conceptual foundation for further research into revenue management practice, adoption, and impact. A comprehensive taxonomy of revenue management is developed, comprising seven indicators and a decision tree. This taxonomy provides a standardised method to classify differences in practice and can be used by practitioners to identify areas for improvement. A framework of driver relationships is created, showing the entwined nature of revenue drivers and cost drivers. It reinforces the need for joint examination of revenue and cost in determining profit, offering an approach to describe and model complex business interactions. This thesis also explores the areas of adoption and impact, offering wide-scale evidence on areas previously examined theoretically or using isolated case studies. Many theorised and new contextual factors have significant and generalisable associations with revenue management, highlighting new settings in which revenue management could be adopted. Results also indicate the value of revenue management, finding a positive association between revenue management and measures of performance and decision-making confidence.