Dynamic Pricing and Scheduling in a Multi-Class Single-Server Queueing System

Abstract

This paper investigates an optimal sequencing and dynamic pricing prob- lem for a two-class queueing system. Using a Markov Decision Process based model, we obtain structural characterizations of optimal policies. In particular, it is shown that the optimal pricing policy depends on the entire queue length vector but some monotonicity results prevail as the composition of this vector changes. A numerical study finds that static pricing policies may have significant suboptimality but simple dynamic pricing policies perform well in most situations.

Keywords: Dynamic control of queues, Multi-class system, Dynamic pricing, Markov Decision Processes