Monopolistic Provision of Congested Service with Incentive-Based Allocation of Priorities
研究公用事业如何通过优先服务方案（价格与优先权菜单）让消费者自选优先等级，以应对容量不确定性，使高短缺成本者获得更高服务可靠性，兼顾消费者与供应商利益。
Because of the uncertainty associated with capacity availability as well as demand, all consumers in a public utility face a chance of not getting the service, however small that chance may be. In electric utilities, for example, the reserve margin (the percent excess capacity over the peak demand) determines the reliability of service to the consumer. We will show in this paper that utilities can employ a priority service scheme (i.e., offer a menu of prices and priorities) that can work to the advantage of consumers as well as the utility. Unreliability in service obviously results in shortage costs to consumers and these shortage costs can vary a lot among consumers, depending on how the consumers value the service and how well they are prepared to cope with any interruptions. Since it is uneconomical to provide a highly reliable service to everyone, it would be desirable to have a scheme, by which those with higher shortage costs get a higher priority of service. Two major points arise when we consider allocating service by priorities: First, the utility can not know the shortage cost to each consumer, but only a distribution of the shortage costs in the population, perhaps through a sample survey. The utility, thus, is not in a position to determine what priority a consumer should have and has to let the consumer choose the priority from a menu of prices and priorities. Second, the utility must have a mechanism by which consumers may be cut off in their priority order. If priority service is to be feasible