Optimal admission and pricing control problems in service industries with multiple servers and sideline profit

✍ Scribed by Jae-Dong Son; Yaghoub Khojasteh Ghamari

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 213 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1524-1904
• DOI: 10.1002/asmb.711

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of selecting profitable customer orders sequentially arriving at a company operating in service industries with multiple servers in which two classes of services are provided. The first class of service is designed to meet the particular needs of customers; and the company (1) makes a decision on whether to accept or to reject the order for this service (admission control) and (2) decides a price of the order and offers it to an arriving customer (pricing control). The second class of service is provided as a sideline, which prevents servers from being idle when the number of customer orders for the first class is less than the number of servers. This yields the sideline profit. A cost is paid to search for customer orders, which is called the search cost. In the context of search cost, the company has an option whether to conduct the search or not. In this paper, we discuss both admission control and pricing control problems within an identical framework as well as examine the structure of the optimal policies to maximize the total expected net profit gained over an infinite planning horizon. We show that when the sideline profit is large, the optimal policies may not be monotone in the number of customer orders in the system. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.