EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Pricing under quality of service uncertainty: Market segmentation via statistical QoS guarantees

Hemant K. Bhargava and Daewon Sun

European Journal of Operational Research, 2008, vol. 191, issue 3, pages 1189-1204

Abstract: This article examines how performance-contingent pricing schemes with long-term statistical performance guarantees can be applied to many IT services. We study two forms of performance-contingent pricing, with rebate proportional to failure rate and fixed rebate for below-threshold performance. We show that threshold-performance contingency pricing can increase both profits and fairness (customers who receive higher benefits pay higher effective price) relative to standard pricing. But an even better solution is to offer a menu of performance guarantees: this can increase the firm's profit and segment the market. Only service providers whose performance level is sufficiently better than the industry standard can benefit from this pricing mechanism.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedi ... 18d2c145b39f5fef33dd
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Series data maintained by Heidi Boesdal ().

 
Page updated 2008-07-06
Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:191:y:2008:i:3:p:1189-1204