PricelineOOPSLA
Well, Priceline works by, roughly, auctioning off seats (etc) for lower prices as the scheduled time grows near. What would happen if we had a similar thing for OOPSLA attendance? So, there would be a cutoff date for guaranteed attendance at full price. Then after that, there would be a bidding system in which the highest bids over the last bidding period would be accepted. We would need to have an idea what the maximum attendance would be and make the bidding start close enough to the conference to make it somewhat dicey someone bidding then could get in. There are lots of issues with this idea, but you're all pretty smart. -rpg
The traditional model is to price it cheaper earlier to get a good view of the expected attendance (that is, a forcing function of raising the price at a given date). I'd be hard pressed to say that there is an effective maximum attendance number, and if there were that's a high class problem.
But another thought was triggered by this - have an artificially limited number of "lower-priced" entries that also expire on a certain date. "It's only $1200 for a full-access entry to OOPSLA, including unlimited tutorials, ..., but this is only good for the first N people or August 1, whichever comes first." You can then auction off some more of these kinds of things? Other thoughts are minimum prices, guaranteed win prices (eBay has a name for this, but I don't recall it), .... Somehow, though, I don't anticipate a bidding war for OOPSLA tickets, but again that would be a good problem to have $-) -RonCrocker
Or use the Burning Man scheme where there are N tickets at, e.g., $200, N more tickets at $300, M at $400, up to the last few tickets at $2000 (or whatever). So the earlier you sign up, the cheaper it is. And then don't offer refunds - those people who have uncertainity can take the risk themselves rather than having OOPSLA take the risk. -BjornFreemanBenson