Reservation Policies in Queues: Advance Deposits, Spot Prices, and Capacity Allocation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Oh, Jaelynn; Su, Xuanming
• 署名单位: Utah System of Higher Education; University of Utah; University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12821
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 680-695
• 关键词: revenue management; pricing; advance selling; service queues

摘要

At firms such as restaurants, customers either make reservations in advance or join queues on the spot. Reservation holders may not show up, and walk-ins have to wait. Using a game-theoretic model between the firm and customers, this paper studies the following: (i) reservation deposits and service prices, and (ii) capacity allocation between reservations and walk-ins. We have three main results: (i) When reservation no-shows lead to wasted capacity that cannot be reallocated, the firm should front-load all charges into the reservation deposit; (ii) The firm should charge a lower service price to reservation-holders than to walk-in customers when it decides to serve both; (iii) Less capacity should be allocated for reservations as the potential market size grows; with sufficiently large potential demand, the firm should stop taking reservations. Our results follow from key operational tradeoffs between reservations and queues: reservations permit 100% utilization, but queues operate at less than 100%; however, reservations have constant returns to scale, while queues enjoy increasing returns.