  Despite the wide adoption of revenue management in many industries such as
airline, railway, and hospitality, there is still scarce empirical evidence on
the gains or losses of such strategies compared to uniform pricing or fully
flexible strategies. We quantify such gains and losses and identify their
underlying sources in the context of French railway transportation. The
identification of demand is complicated by censoring and the absence of
exogenous price variations. We develop an original identification strategy
combining temporal variations in relative prices, consumers' rationality and
weak optimality conditions on the firm's pricing strategy. Our results suggest
similar or better performance of the actual revenue management compared to
optimal uniform pricing, but also substantial losses of up to 16.7% compared to
the optimal pricing strategy. We also highlight the key role of revenue
management in acquiring information when demand is uncertain.
