The service pricing strategies and the strategic behavior of customers in an unobservable Markovian queue with unreliable server

Abstract

A Stackelberg game is used to study the service pricing and the strategic behavior of customers in an unreliable and totally unobservable M/M/1 queue under a reward-cost structure. At the first stage, the server manager, acting as a leader, chooses a service price and, at the second stage, a customer, arriving at the system and acting as a follower, chooses to join the system or an outside opportunity, knowing only the service price imposed by the server manager and the system parameters. We show that the constructed game admits an equilibrium and we give explicit forms of server manager and customers equilibrium behavioral strategies. The results of the proposed model show that the assumption that customers are risk-neutral is fundamental for the standard approach usually used. Moreover, we determine the socially optimal price that maximizes the social welfare and we compare it to the Stackelberg equilibrium. We illustrate, by numerical examples, the effect of some system parameters on the equilibrium service price and the revenue of the server manager.