Opaque pricing over vertically differentiated servers
研究服务企业在服务器质量差异化且可随经验提升时，提出一种不透明定价方案（支付前不告知服务器分配），证明其长期总收益优于常用定价方案，并分析质量提升和纵向差异化程度对收益优势的影响。
We study a pricing problem for a service firm facing delay-sensitive customers. Servers are quality-differentiated, where the quality can be improved based on the servers’ past experience. In such cases, the commonly used pricing scheme fails to effectively facilitate the quality improvement for servers and therefore impedes the firm’s future revenue increase. Motivated by the probabilistic selling strategy, we propose another pricing scheme where the firm does not disclose the server assignment to the customers until payment is made. With respect to the long-run total revenue, we compare the two schemes and establish the superiority of the one that we propose. Moreover, we investigate how the revenue advantage from the proposed pricing scheme is affected by the quality improvement process and the degree of vertical differentiation, both of which are important features in the setting. Finally, we discuss the generalized model with heterogeneous arrival classes.