The Price is Right! Brought to you by Business Intelligence

Today: a brief synopsis of airline flights, breakfast cereals, scalpers, non-profits, and how business intelligence is, of course, the answer.

Pricing.  We are confronted with pricing all the time — making a series of value judgments on the relative worth of the item or service in question. Twenty times a day or more, our brain decides “that is a fair price for a TV” or “that’s pretty expensive for a bagel” or “gee, what a deal on a lawnmower!” 

Some industries seem to have more predictable pricing than others. On one hand, you have something like breakfast cereal, with prices that move based on inflation, commodities and oil prices, but are quite predictable. On the other end of the scale are airline tickets, which appear to be based on a complex matrix of energy prices, carrier competition, holiday seasons, sunspots and unified string theory.  Still, whether it is Corn Flakes or a trip to Maui, you see the price and make a value decision on whether to make the purchase.

Until recently, in the non-profit  ticketing business, pricing has hung closer to the breakfast cereal side of the scale – setting prices once a year, typically by tacking a couple of bucks onto last year’s prices.  Historically, non-profits have seemingly assumed that the value of their art doesn’t fluctuate very much.