The Cross-Industry Universal Laws of Exponential Booking Curves

In recent years, the e-commerce market has grown with the spread of the internet worldwide every year. Accordingly, in service industries, purchasing products with reservations has become common. With the spread of online reservations, the booking curve, which is the concept of the time series in the cumulative number of reservations and has been used for sales optimization in the airline ticket and hotel industries, has been used in various industries. Booking curves in specific industries have been studied, but a universally applicable model across various industries has not been developed. In this study, we show that booking curves can be modeled universally by the exponential decay function, and we also show that the model is valid by using real data from some industries before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, that is, under completely different market conditions. The cross-industry exponential laws of booking curves constitute an important discovery in regard to mathematical laws in the social sciences and can be applied to give leading microeconomic indicators.