Improvement in stands pricing and candidate companies allocation at agricultural exposition

Abstract Agricultural expositions are events aimed at product sales, training, technology dissemination, and integration between the agricultural sector and urban residents. In order to hold agricultural expositions, management steps must be followed, especially fundraising, due to the high costs of the event. One way to raise funds is to sell stands to candidate companies to exhibit products at the event. Therefore, the objective of this article was to propose maximizing the profit of the agricultural exposition through the sale of stands. The Mixed Integer Linear Programming technique for mathematical modeling based on qualitative and quantitative parameters was used to achieve the research objective, enabling a more financially efficient and democratic allocation for candidate companies, using dynamic values between stands. In the traditional allocation process, the price is unified for all stands and filled according to the candidate company's choice among those available, reducing the fundraising capacity by up to 29.76% in the instance generated for the proposed scenario. By implementing the dynamic allocation process, agricultural expositions can be less dependent on public and private funding for support and sponsorship, causing self-sustainability, investment power, and economic growth. Furthermore, the proposed process enables democratization through the participation of local candidate companies with smaller investment budgets, stimulating the economy and regional development. Finally, the present research advances to a new marketing process and allocation of candidate companies at the stands, in addition to the financial and social improvement, promoting a different vision on the topic in relation to the traditional process culturally practiced.