Dynamic pricing

[jcm55]

Wondering if anyone has given thought to dynamic pricing for Civi events?  The idea is that pricing for an event (or performance in our case) is adjusted dynamically based on demand, which can be inferred from things like sales rate, % full, remaining days before event, etc.  SF Giants started using this for baseball tickets in 2009 with much success, and it's now spread to most professional sports teams.  Airlines have of course been doing it for somewhat longer.

The CiviDiscount extension provides a good template on how to implement something like this.  Except in this case we adjust price up or down using a computation on some set of variables instead of a discount code lookup.  The tricky part is deciding which variables to use, what the math should be, price floor and ceiling, etc.  Obviously many of these will vary org to org.  Maybe more art than science?

In any case, I'm curious to know if anyone else has thought about it, ideas, discussion, etc.

[Eileen]

I made some updates to the CiviDiscount extension to make the discounting more flexible. It's possible to make a discount apply based on any api call - so it would probably be possible to add some api in an extension & leverage it from CiviDiscount.

Note this applies to the 4.5 CiviDiscount - although there is a forked version that works on 4.4 if required.