Strategic Revenue Management of Preemptive versus Non-Preemptive Queues

Social Welfare and Price of Anarchy in Preemptive Priority Queues

Consider an unobservable $M|G|1$ queue with preemptive-resume scheduling and two priority classes. Customers are strategic and may join the premium class for a fee. We analyze the resulting equilibrium outcomes, equilibrium stability, and social welfare. We find that for service distributions with coefficient of variation greater than 1, there exists a unique and stable mixed equilibrium at low loads. We also establish a tight bound on the price of anarchy, which is $4/3$.

Strategic Arrivals to Queues Offering Priority Service

We consider strategic arrivals to a FCFS service system that starts service at a fixed time and has to serve a fixed number of customers, e.g., an airplane boarding system. Arriving early induces a higher waiting cost (waiting before service begins) while arriving late induces a cost because earlier arrivals take the better seats. We first consider arrivals of heterogeneous customers that choose arrival times to minimize the weighted sum of waiting cost and and cost due to expected number of predecessors. We characterize the unique Nash equilibria for this system. Next, we consider a system of…

Revenue maximization with access and information pricing schemes in a partially-observable queueing game

Today's queueing network systems are more rapidly evolving and more complex than those of even a few years ago. The goal of this paper is to study customers' behavior in an unobservable Markovian M/M/1 queue where consumers have to choose between two strategic decisions about information acquisition before joining or not the queue. According to their decision, customers decide to give up the service (balk the system) or to join the queue. We study the Nash equilibrium strategies: we compute the equilibrium and we prove its existence and uniqueness. Based on this result, we consider the problem…

异质顾客服务系统的收益最大化

Revenue Maximization in Service Systems with Heterogeneous Customers

在本文中，我们考虑收入最大化问题的两个服务器系统中存在的异构客户。我们假设，客户不同的单位延迟的成本，这是建模为一个连续的随机变量的分布$F.$。我们还假设，每个服务器收费的入场价格，每个客户决定加入其队列。我们首先考虑两个服务器都属于一个运营商的垄断问题。客户的异质性使得问题的分析变得困难。困难在于无法将均衡队列到达率描述为入场价格的函数。我们提供了一个等价的制定与队列到达率作为优化变量简化分析的收入率最大化的垄断。然后，我们考虑双头垄断问题，每个服务器与其他服务器竞争，以最大限度地提高其收益率。对于双头垄断问题，研究的目的是得到满足纳什均衡条件的入场价格集合。虽然这个问题通常很难分析，但我们考虑两个服务器相同的特殊情况。对于这样的双寡头垄断系统，我们得到了准入价格对称纳什均衡存在的必要条件。分布$F$的知识表征的异质性的客户是必要的，以解决垄断和双头垄断问题。然而，对于大多数实际情况，系统运营商可能不知道$F$的函数形式，并且在这种情况下，不能确定收入最大化价格。在论文的最后一部分，我们提供了一个简单的方法来估计分布$F$适当地改变入场价格。我们用一些数值例子来说明该方法。

An optimal mechanism charging for priority in a queue

We derive a revenue-maximizing scheme that charges customers who are homogeneous with respect to their waiting cost parameter for a random fee in order to become premium customers. This scheme incentivizes all customers to purchase priority, each at his/her drawn price. We also design a revenue-maximizing scheme for the case where customers are heterogeneous with respect to their waiting cost parameter. Now lower cost parameter customers are encouraged to join the premium class at a low price: Given that, those with high cost parameter would be willing to pay even more for this privilege.

队列系统中的静态定价保障

Static Pricing Guarantees for Queueing Systems

本文提出了一种静态定价策略，通过保证收入和队列长度的常数比例，为队列系统提供非渐近性能保证。