Near-Optimality of Coarse Service Grades for Customer Differentiation in Queueing Systems

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nazerzadeh, Hamid; Randhawa, Ramandeep S.
• 署名单位: University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12818
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 578-595
• 关键词: Pricing; delay sensitivity; queueing approximations

摘要

We analyze a service firm that caters to price and delay-sensitive customers who are differentiated on both their value for the service and the cost of waiting. There is a continuum of customer types in our setting and we model each customer's cost of waiting to be linear in the delay incurred with a multiplier that is an increasing linear or sub-linear function of the customer's value for the service. Using a large system approach, we characterize the firm's revenue maximizing menu of price and delay quotations and the value of customer differentiation. We further characterize thevalue of offering coarse or few service grades and find that offering two service grades is asymptotically optimal on the typical square-root scale, relative to the optimal policy.