Currently, the Internet service provider market offers two different types of pricing plans. In the USA, the predominant pricing plan is a flat-rate plan. In Europe and Asia, the predominant one is a per-minute pricing plan. Enrolled in such a pricing plan, users have to pay for the connect time to the Internet. Although Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have competed heavily for users in these...

This paper reports on the results of a dynamic pricing experiment that compares the performance of three popular pricing programs–hourly pricing, critical peak pricing, and critical peak-pricing with a rebate–for a representative sample from the population of households in the District of Columbia. The sampled households differ in terms of their income levels, electricityusing appliance holding...

Several real problems in telecommunication, transportation, and distribution industries can be well analyzed by network flow models. In revenue management, pricing plays a primary role which increases the profit generated from a limited supply of assets. Pricing decision directly affects the amount of service or product demand. Hence, in traditional maximum flow problem, we assume that the dema...

We organize the existing theoretical pricing research into a new two-level framework for industrial goods pricing. The first level consists of four pricing situations: New Product, Competitive, Product Line, and Cost-based. The second level consists of the pricing strategies appropriate for a given situation. For example, within the new product pricing situation, there are three alternative pri...

The stochastic nature of demand suggests that firms can benefit from applying dynamic pricing strategies, where pricing decisions are postponed until information about demand is revealed. Many service providers, however, announce prices in advance and do not frequently adjust them as a response to market conditions (i.e., static pricing). This may seem suboptimal when demand is high and the fir...

Economists have long advocated congestion pricing as an efficient way of allocating scarce roadway capacity. However, with a few exceptions, congestion tolls are rarely used in practice and strongly opposed by the public and elected officials. Although high implementation costs and privacy issues are alleviated as appropriate technologies are developed, the concerns that congestion pricing will...

We consider the problem of pricing for bandwidth provisioning over a single link, where users arrive according to a known stochastic traffic model. The network administrator controls the resource allocation by setting a price at every epoch, and each user’s response to the price is governed by a demand function. We formulate this problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP)...

Static optimization of networks by pricing has attracted significant attention over the last decade. These studies assumed concave utility functions for users and derived optimal pricing strategies for the network provider. In this paper, we consider effect of user’s elasticity to price and bandwidth on optimality of pricing. We first derive optimal pricing strategy for the case of logarithmic ...