[rockostrich]

Not really, at least as far as I know. Historically, prices have been set in a pretty ad-hoc manner by revenue managers at the airlines. I'm pretty sure that's where the "best deals for flights are on Tuesdays" thing comes from. Revenue managers would show up to work on Monday, spend the whole day reviewing the performance of their routes and then on Tuesday morning they would set the new prices for flights based on that analysis. In some cases, they mess up and you would get a really good deal because humans aren't perfect.

What has changed a bit is airlines have invested more into machine learning and trying to apply revenue optimization models to programmatically adjust their prices. You still get those weird deals since there's still some ad-hoc price adjustment and also machine learning models aren't perfect, but the pattern is less predictable.