An Optimal Incentive-Compatible Assignment Rule and Pricing Policy for Multi-Server Queues

摘要

Variability of demand and perishability of service capacity lead to the imbalance between demand and supply. This creates a challenge for service managers. This paper studies assignment rule and pricing issues in multi-period heterogeneous servers. When customers are self-optimizing and have private information about their delay costs, a service manager who wishes to maximize steady-state net value (or revenue) per unit time may use an assignment and pricing mechanism to incent customers. We consider the static mechanisms, so a multi-period problem can be transformed into a multi-server problem. We discuss two cases, net value maximization and revenue maximization, and study the stationary properties of the system. The comparison of the two models shows that the net value maximization model will serve more customers, this result is intuitive, but the optimal price of a particular server may higher than the corresponding price in the revenue maximization model.