On Nash Equilibrium Self-Policy for an Observable Queue

10.29893/NCUTMAN.201811.0024

Chia-Li Wang

heterogeneous customer ； incentive-compatibility ； fairness ； class dominance ； fixed point theorem

管理學術研討會

第十六屆（2018 / 11 / 01）

145 - 150

英文

Suppose that customers arriving at a queueing system are heterogeneous in service preference. They first observe the number of customers in the system upon arrival, then decide whether to join for service or balk based on expected personal gain. With a non-decreasing and concave service rate in the number of customers in system, the system is shown to have a positive number of deterministic self-interest policies (simply called self-policies), but at most one of those is the Nash equilibrium. A necessary condition of the equilibrium self-policy being class dominant is also investigated. On the other hand, for a system without an equilibrium policy, we show that the system can be led to equilibrium by adjusting service rates. As a result, this system, unlike the common pricing scheme, has the merit of incentive compatibility. Finally, we propose several criterion of fairness for finding appropriate service rate adjustments.