Priority Pricing for Profit Maximization Given Strategic, Delay-Sensitive Customers with a Continuum of Types

本奖项的研究目标是研究服务提供商面对延迟敏感的战略客户到达流。客户的“类型”包括她对服务的评估和她的延迟敏感性（等待成本）。虽然客户类型的分布可能是已知的，或部分已知的，但个人的客户类型是未知的。研究方法是研究一个连续的客户估值（而不是一个有限的数字），从而能够分析无限多个价格/延迟组合。本研究的成果将包括一个收入最大化的激励兼容的价格菜单，其中客户支付更高的价格以获得更高的排队优先权，从而降低延迟。此外，该研究将提供建模和分析工具以及不同客户类型下的收入和福利比较。如果成功，本研究将解决一个及时的问题：如何为客户分配和定价服务优先权，其中客户在其估值（可用资金）和延迟敏感性方面是异质的，并且愿意在这些方面撒谎。该奖项将产生简单的封闭式最优价格菜单，针对不同的优先级别收取不同的价格，从而优化服务提供商的利润。这项研究是由两个非常不同的研究领域：激励相容定价和排队理论的结合而成的，并有助于卡内基梅隆大学和荷兰的TUE/EURANDOM研究所在定价和排队方面的长期国际合作。开发的数学还将帮助培训西部PA ARML团队的研究生和本科生以及数学奥林匹克K-12学生，并将为SWAN项目的最佳收养安置做出贡献。

The research objective of this award is to study a service provider facing an arrival stream of delay-sensitive, strategic customers. The "type" of a customer consists of her valuation for service and her delay sensitivity (waiting cost). While the distribution of customer types may be known, or partially known, an individual's customer type is not known. The research approach is to study a continuum of customer valuations (rather than a finite number), enabling the analysis of infinitely many price/delay combinations. The deliverables of this research will include a revenue-maximizing incentive-compatible menu of prices, where a customer pays a higher price to receive higher queuing priority, and hence lower delay. Additionally the research will deliver modeling and analysis tools and revenue and welfare comparisons under different customer types.If successful, this research will solve a timely problem: how to allocate and price service priority to customers, where the customers are heterogeneous in their valuations (available funds)and in their delay sensitivities and are willing to lie about these. The award will produce simple closed-form optimal price menus that charge different prices for different priority levels, so as to optimize profit for the service provider. The research is made possible by a combination of two very different research areas: incentive-compatible pricing and queuing theory and contributes to a long-term ongoing international collaboration in pricing and queuing between Carnegie Mellon and the TUE/EURANDOM Institute in the Netherlands. The mathematics developed will also help train graduate and undergraduate students as well as Math Olympiad K-12 students in the Western PA ARML team and will contribute to the SWAN program on optimal adoption placement.