Designing serious games for revenue management training and strategy development

This paper proposes a framework for the design of serious games in the area of revenue management. At this time, there is little systematic consideration of simulation-based serious games and their set-up available in this field. The suggested framework regards games as structured in three layered stages and explicates decisions influencing their design and focus. These decisions are structured according to five aspects: concurrence, conditions, cognizance, cooperation and competition. Revenue management provides a particular challenge as its success depends not only on the customer choice, competition and sophisticated operations research algorithms, but also on analysts' understanding. Simulation systems are a well-known tool for the evaluation of revenue management approaches in research and practice and can easily be extended for use in serious games. The framework introduced here can be used for future evaluations of alternative designs of serious games aiming to improve revenue management understanding and strategy evaluation.