Pay to activate service in vacation queues

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wang, Zhongbin; Liu, Yunan; Fang, Lei
• 署名单位: Tianjin University; North Carolina State University; Nankai University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.13705
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 2609-2627
• 关键词: equilibrium analysis; N-policy; pay to activate service; Strategic Customers; vacation queue

摘要

We study a vacation queueing model where an arriving customer, upon finding the server to be on vacation, is offered an opportunity to pay a fee to instantaneously end the server's vacation, which is referred to as pay-to-activate-service (PTAS). If no one utilizes PTAS, the service will automatically resume when the system's workload reaches a critical level. We investigate customers' equilibrium strategies: (i) joining or balking and (ii) if joining, accepting PTAS or rejecting PTAS, in response to such a mechanism; we show that customers' equilibrium strategies exhibit both avoid-the-crowd (ATC) and follow-the-crowd (FTC) types of behavior. Our results indicate that the adoption of PTAS is efficient in improving the system performance (e.g., revenue and throughput) when the demand volume is intermediate. We also discover that, upon selecting the appropriate queue-length information disclosure policy, the service provider has to trade off between collecting a higher revenue through PTAS and improving the system throughput, because revealing the queue-length information will impact the aforementioned two performance metrics in opposing directions. Finally, we compare our new setting to other common mechanisms including regular vacation queues and pay-for-priority queues.