Solving for an optimal airline yield management policy via statistical learning

Summary. The yield management (YM) problem considers the task of maximizing a company's revenue. For the competitive airline industry, profit margins depend on a good YM policy. Research on airline YM is abundant but still limited to heuristics and small cases. We address the YM problem for a major domestic airline carrier's hub-and-spoke network, involving 20 cities and 31 flight legs. This is a problem of realistic size since airline networks are usually separated by hub cities. Our method is a variant of the orthogonal array experimental designs and multivariate adaptive regression splines stochastic dynamic programming method. Our method is demonstrated to outperform state of the art YM methods.     

Advances in structural equation modeling—the 2009 meeting of the working group SEM

This editorial introduces the Special Issue “Advances in Structural Equation Modeling” which provides a snapshot of the different research activities performed by members of the working group “Structural Equation Modeling”. More specifically, this issue contains a selection of papers presented at the 2009 annual meeting in Berlin at Humboldt University.     

Regulations, policies and practices concerning work stress in five European countries

A comparative inventory of regulations, policies and practices in The Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Germany and France with regard to the prevention of work stress was carried out. In each country data were collected by means of interviews with key informants and through exploring relevant documents and literature. It was found that Sweden, The Netherlands and the UK—those countries with framework legislation in the field of health and safety—recognize stress as an important health and safety topic, whereas Germany and France do not yet recognize stress as an important policy issue. However, even in the first group of countries less attention is being paid towards psychosocial work characteristics when compared with traditional health and safety issues, such as noise, machine safety and toxic agents. There is a clear lack of well-documented (national) 'examples of good preventive practice', even in Sweden and The Netherlands. Recommendations are being formulated concerning type of legislation, guidance and information, monitoring and risk assessment, costs and benefits, examples of good practice and European networking.