Simultaneous Determination of Theatrical Casting and Ticket Distribution Using Scheduling Auction

Abstract

The value or social surplus created by a theatrical drama is determined by the content of the drama, such as the cast, and ticket prices. The desirable cast and suitable ticket price depend on the preferences of the customers; however, in the current theater industry, they are fully determined by the theater company, which has incomplete information on the customer preferences. Therefore, this study proposes an extended auction mechanism that simultaneously addresses theatrical casting and ticket distribution according to the actual customers’ preferences. To achieve this, it presents a mathematical formulation of the theatrical casting problem, and embeds it into the scheduling auction framework. The proposed mechanism maximizes the social surplus brought about by the drama based on the bids gathered from potential customers in an incentive-compatible manner. This study also presents a comparative method that determines the theatrical casting and ticket distribution separately, and solves them in sequence within a shorter calculation time. The numerical experiments show that the proposed method achieves a social surplus that is averagely 29% higher than that of the comparative method. However, the calculation time of the proposed method increases exponentially with the problem scale. In future work, a more computationally efficient mechanism will be required for wider social implementation.