Reservation Policies in Queues: Advance Deposits, Spot Prices, and Capacity Allocation
研究餐厅等服务企业如何设定预订定金和服务价格，以及在预订和现场排队之间分配容量，发现当预订缺席导致容量浪费时，企业应将所有费用前置到定金中，且当潜在市场规模足够大时应停止接受预订。
At firms such as restaurants, customers either make reservations in advance or join queues on the spot. Reservation holders may not show up, and walk‐ins have to wait. Using a game‐theoretic model between the firm and customers, this paper studies the following: (i) reservation deposits and service prices, and (ii) capacity allocation between reservations and walk‐ins. We have three main results: (i) When reservation no‐shows lead to wasted capacity that cannot be reallocated, the firm should front‐load all charges into the reservation deposit; (ii) The firm should charge a lower service price to reservation‐holders than to walk‐in customers when it decides to serve both; (iii) Less capacity should be allocated for reservations as the potential market size grows; with sufficiently large potential demand, the firm should stop taking reservations. Our results follow from key operational tradeoffs between reservations and queues: reservations permit 100% utilization, but queues operate at less than 100%; however, reservations have constant returns to scale, while queues enjoy increasing returns.