Pricing Services and Products in the Presence of Parallel Delivery Mechanisms and Strategic Consumer Behavior

交付机制是公司向客户销售其产品和服务的过程。例如，在在线市场上，一些卖家选择以固定的张贴价格出售他们的产品，而另一些卖家则征求投标并出售给出价最高的人。在卖家通过单一的交付机制提供产品的假设下，已经有许多研究比较了不同交付机制对卖家和客户的好处。然而，公司越来越多地通过多种交付机制并行提供产品和服务，允许客户在交付机制中进行选择。该项目的目标是开发模型和算法，帮助销售商选择并行运行的交付机制，在每个交付机制中收取什么价格，以及如何在不同的交付机制之间分配有限的服务能力。在本项目范围内开发的模型和算法将使卖家在为客户提供更有效的服务的同时实现收入最大化。并行交付机制分析的一个关键困难是客户是战略性的，他们是否使用特定的交付机制取决于卖家和其他客户的决策。这种依赖关系需要运用博弈论和随机模型的工具来分析消费者和卖家的决策所导致的均衡。可以证明，计算均衡是困难的。这个项目将确定均衡存在的条件，并将描述处于均衡状态的客户所采用的策略的结构。这一特征将被用来识别使用特定交付机制的客户的特征，就不同交付机制使用的价格和服务能力做出设计决策，并找到卖方和客户之间的最佳信息共享量。

Delivery mechanisms are the processes by which firms sell their products and services to customers. For example, in online marketplaces, some sellers choose to sell their products at a fixed posted price, whereas others solicit bids and sell to the highest bidder. There have been many studies comparing the benefits of different delivery mechanisms to sellers and customers under the assumption that sellers offer their products through a single delivery mechanism. However, firms increasingly offer their products and services through multiple delivery mechanisms in parallel, allowing their customers to choose among the delivery mechanisms. The goal of this project is to develop models and algorithms to help sellers choose which delivery mechanisms to operate in parallel, what prices to charge in each delivery mechanism, and how to allocate limited service capacity among the different delivery mechanisms. The models and algorithms developed within the scope of this project will enable sellers to maximize their revenue, while providing more effective service to their customers.A key difficulty in the analysis of parallel delivery mechanisms is that the customers are strategic, and their decision to make use of a particular delivery mechanism depends on the decisions of the seller and of other customers. This dependence requires analyzing the equilibrium resulting from customers' and seller's decisions by using tools from game theory and stochastic models. Computation of equilibria is provably hard. This project will identify conditions under which equilibria exist and will characterize the structure of strategies employed by customers in equilibrium. This characterization will be used to identify the features of customers who make use of a particular delivery mechanism, make design decisions on prices and service capacities used in different delivery mechanisms, and to find the optimal amount of information sharing between the seller and the customers.