Pricing experiments for a computer-telephony-service usageallocation
Shih, J.S.; Katz, R.H.; Joseph, A.D.
Global Telecommunications Conference, 2001. GLOBECOM apos;01. IEEE
Volume 4, Issue , 2001 Page(s):2450 - 2454 vol.4
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/GLOCOM.2001.966217
Summary:Charging a higher price during periods of congestion should more
efficiently allocate scarce resources by encouraging users to conserve.
We study its benefits by conducting several pricing experiments over two
semesters with students in the dormitories using a
computer-telephony-service. Users can use the service to make and
receive phone calls from their computers or telephones. While we do not
charge users real money, we limit each user to a certain number of
tokens a week. With this experimental setup, we conducted a different
pricing experiment each week to better understand how prices can be used
to entice users to talk less, talk at another time, or use a lower
quality connection. With our token scheme as a budget constraint, we can
use static pricing policies to influence users' behaviors, but cannot
use a simple congestion pricing scheme to encourage users to talk less.
For example, we can use time-of-day pricing to encourage users to shift
30% of their usages from the peak to the off-peak hours. We can also use
call-duration pricing, a higher rate as a call lasts longer, to
encourage 3 times as many calls (18% instead of 6%) to terminate after a
price increase. However, when using a simple congestion pricing scheme
that charges a rate depending on the number of people calling, we find
that we cannot get users to terminate their calls earlier. We believe
that users do not change their behaviors because they do not know how
long the price increases or decreases will last. Thus to make a
congestion pricing scheme more effective, we believe that the price
changes need to be more permanent to entice users to change their
behaviors'
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