Showing papers on "Dynamic pricing published in 1998"

Market-based resource control for mobile agents

Abstract: Mobile agents are programs that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous, partially disconnected network. As mobile agents move across a network, they consume resources. We discuss a system for controlling the activities of mobile agents that uses electronic cash, a banking system, and a set of resource managers. We describe protocols for transactions between agents. We present fixed-pricing and dynamic-pricing policies for resources. We focus on and analyze the sealed-bid second-price auction as a mechanism for dynamic pricing.

Reservation-based Charging in an Integrated Services Network

Abstract: Valuable high-end communication services cannot be assigned in a cooperative fashion, they must be rather granted on grounds of economic admission policies. Usagebased pricing models for an integrated services Internet have been proposed, but on a theoretical level only. In this paper, a control protocol for charging and accounting resource reservations in the integrated services Internet is presented, highlighting implementation issues and performance aspects with such usage-based pricing models. The general design decisions as well as a first implementation are described. They are based on a simple version of the resource reservation protocol RSVP. The pricing models employed were (1) an auction-based pricing model (delta auction) and (2) an adaptive, load-sensitive, volume pricing model. The protocol can handle these pricing models concurrently, i.e., it supports local pricing decisions. Furthermore, sender and receiver of a connection can share the cost of a transmission. Finally, the prototype implementation was used to obtain first results and measurements concerning the overhead in terms of network and computing resources. Processing overhead for large number of f lows and dynamic pricing schemes was measured at less than 2.3% and protocol overhead is typically 0.75%.

Some evidence on customer ‘lock-in’ in the French mutual funds industry

Abstract: We build on earlier work in the literature on economies of scale and scope in the financial services industry by using a unique French data set covering 162 financial institutions. In the institutional context of the French mutual funds industry, it has been argued that consumers incur significant costs in switching from one bank to another bank. Switching costs could create ‘lock-in’ that could be used by an institution to extract more rent over time. This paper attempts to differentiate empirically between dynamic pricing strategies (such as customer lock-in) and cost based explanations such as scale and scope economies in the context of the French mutual funds industry. Our results indicate support for the customer ‘lock-in’ hypothesis for the dominant segment of the French SICAV industry, namely the money market funds. For other funds, however, we find no such systematic evidence.

Real-time reliability-based electricity pricing

Abstract: Electricity provides a unique opportunity to determine how much consumers will actually pay for product reliability. The electric network is robust and can generally survive the failure of several components. As these components fail, sensing devices on the portion of the network still operating can continually produce reliability indices. The central reliability index, system frequency, can be used with other reliability indices to set the price for electricity on a concurrent, real-time basis. Electric systems now operate in a command and control environment. A system operator makes decisions to match the level of total generation and the level of total load, generally controlling the production of electricity, but sometimes also controlling the use of electricity. With the increase in competition, electric systems need to add economic incentives to the tools the system operator has available to achieve the real-time matching of generation and load. A dynamic reliability-based price for electricity would allow customers to make the explicit choice between reliability of service and the price of electricity. Similarly, independent equipment owners could make economic decisions to increase system reliability at the cost of installing and operating equipment. Such a dynamic pricing mechanism would provide an economic negative feedback loop that determines both economically and physically the optimal operating level.

Dynamic and static charging of the ABR service in ATM network

Abstract: Charging may be an essential condition for available bit rate (ABR) sources to adapt their traffic demand. In this paper we analyze different approaches for a usage-based pricing of ABR. We have classified these approaches as "static" and "dynamic". We refer as static a pricing scheme where the charging parameters are established at the connection set up and do not change afterwards, and dynamic otherwise. We analyze a static and a dynamic pricing scheme which have been already suggested. We propose new alternatives which solve some of their drawbacks, giving an analytical justification of the dynamic scheme. Finally, we confront the pricing schemes by means of a numerical comparison.

Dynamic Price Adjustment Under Imperfect Competition

Abstract: We study dynamic price adjustment under imperfect competition when consumers have non-time-separable preferences. In our model an intertemporal link arises in the consumers' maximization problems because current consumption decisions affect the utility of future consumption. Thus future demand depends on the current price and firms must take this into account when making their decisions. The main result is that equilibrium prices follow a dynamic stochastic process in which the current price depends on past prices and on random disturbances. The convergence of prices to the `long run expected price' is monotonic if current and future consumption are substitutes and oscillatory if they are complements.