Optimal Price and Delay Differentiation in Queueing Systems
Optimal Price and Delay Differentiation in Queueing Systems
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2297042
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发表时间：
2013-06
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Costis Maglaras;John Yao;A. Zeevi
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文献类型：
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作者：
Costis Maglaras;John Yao;A. Zeevi
我们研究了一个多服务器供应商模型的收入最大化的公司提供服务的市场异构的价格和延迟敏感的客户与私人个人偏好。该公司可以提供一个选择的服务类别，在价格和延迟的差异。使用确定性松弛，突出了一阶经济结构的问题，我们构建了一个解决方案，这是激励兼容和接近最优的大容量和市场潜力的系统。我们的方法为大规模系统提供了几个新的见解：i）易处理的一阶分析基本上描述了最优解的所有显著特征; ii）当对延迟不敏感的细分市场具有足够的弹性时，服务差异化是最优的; iii）取决于系统容量和市场异质性，“故意拖延”（人为增加延误）可用来证明较昂贵服务类别的价格溢价是合理的，类似于经济学文献中“受损货物”的作用;以及iv）将经济优化与排队理论联系起来，收入优化系统使优质等级在“质量驱动”机制下运行，而较低级别的服务等级在“效率驱动”机制下运行（即，具有明显的延迟，该延迟是内源性的或者是由于服务提供商故意注入延迟而引起的）。
We study a multi-server queueing model of a revenue-maximizing firm providing a service to a market of heterogeneous price- and delay-sensitive customers with private individual preferences. The firm may offer a selection of service classes that are differentiated in prices and delays. Using a deterministic relaxation, which highlights the first-order economic structure of the problem, we construct a solution that is incentive compatible and near-optimal in systems with large capacity and market potential. Our approach provides several new insights for large-scale systems: i) the tractable first-order analysis characterizes essentially all salient features of the optimal solution; ii) service differentiation is optimal when the less delay-sensitive market segment is sufficiently elastic; iii) depending on system capacity and market heterogeneity, "intentional delay" (whereby delay is artificially added) in cheaper service classes may be used to justify price premiums in the more expensive service classes, akin to the role of "damaged goods" in the economics literature; and iv) connecting economic optimization to queueing theory, the revenue-optimized system has the premium class operating in a "quality-driven" regime and the lower-tier service classes operating in an "efficiency-driven" regime (i.e., with noticeable delays that arise either endogenously or due to the injection of intentional delay by the service provider).