Optimal Price and Delay Differentiation in Large-Scale Queueing Systems

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Maglaras, Costis; Yao, John; Zeevi, Assaf
• 署名单位: Columbia University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2016.2713
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 2427-2444
• 关键词: service differentiation; pricing; revenue management; damaged goods; Queueing Games; many-server limits

摘要

We study a multiserver queueing model of a revenue-maximizing firm providing a service to a market of heterogeneous price-and delay-sensitive customers with private individual preferences. The firm may offer a selection of service classes that are differentiated in prices and delays. Using a deterministic relaxation, which simplifies the problem by preserving the economic aspects of price-and-delay differentiation while ignoring queueing delays, we construct a solution to the fully stochastic problem that is incentive compatible and near optimal in systems with large capacity and market potential. Our approach provides several new insights for large-scale systems: (i) the deterministic analysis captures all pricing, differentiation, and delay characteristics of the stochastic solution that are nonnegligible at large scale; (ii) service differentiation is optimal when the less delay-sensitive market segment is sufficiently elastic; (iii) the use of strategic delay depends on system capacity and market heterogeneity-and it contributes significant delay when the system capacity is underutilized or when the firm offers three or more service classes; and (iv) connecting economic optimization to queueing theory, the revenue-optimized system has the premium class operating in a quality-driven regime and the lower-tier service classes operating with noticeable delays that arise either endogenously (efficiency-driven regime) or with the addition of strategic delay by the service provider.