论文标题
基于方差的定价的竞争影响
The Competitive Effects of Variance-based Pricing
论文作者
论文摘要
在许多市场（例如电力或云计算市场）中，提供商会产生巨大的成本，以保持足够的储备能力以适应大多数固定用户群的需求波动。这些成本受到用户需求的不可预测性的显着影响。然而，标准机制向不取决于用户需求的可变性的固定每单位价格收取固定的每单位价格。在本文中，我们研究了两国提供市场环境中的基于方差的定价规则，并对由此产生的竞争效应进行游戏理论分析。我们表明，采用基于方差的定价的创新提供商可以选择一种定价策略，该策略比使用固定的单位价格来保证自己获得更高的利润，而对于提供固定定价策略的提供商的任何个人合理响应。我们在两个提供商采用基于方差的定价策略的环境中表征了所有均衡。我们发现，尽管在均衡时，提供者的利润可能会根据其成本功能而增加或减少，但社会福利总是微弱地增加。
In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by the unpredictability of the users' demand. Nevertheless, standard mechanisms charge fixed per-unit prices that do not depend on the variability of the users' demand. In this paper, we study a variance-based pricing rule in a two-provider market setting and perform a game-theoretic analysis of the resulting competitive effects. We show that an innovative provider who employs variance-based pricing can choose a pricing strategy that guarantees himself a higher profit than using fixed per-unit prices for any individually rational response of a provider playing a fixed pricing strategy. We characterize all equilibria for the setting where both providers employ variance-based pricing strategies. We find that, while in equilibrium, the profits of the providers may increase or decrease depending on their cost functions, social welfare always weakly increases.
