Equilibrium pricing strategies in retrial queueing systems with complementary services

An unobservable retrial queueing system with complementary services is studied, in which customers are risk neutral and they have no information of the system upon arrival, but have to make the decision to join the system or not to maximize their expected benefits. In our model, one server provides an instantaneous service while the other offers a service with delayed customers, which is modeled as an M/M/1 retrial queue. The two services are complementary and the customer has no benefit from obtaining just one of them. Under various pricing schemes, we investigate the customers' reward-cost situations and the servers' price strategies in equilibrium. In each pricing scheme three scenarios are studied according to the different ownership of the two servers: (1) they are owned and operated by two different private agents; (2) they are owned and operated by a common private agent; or (3) one is owned and operated by a private agent, and the other by a public agent. Some numerical experiments of the equilibrium solutions are presented. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.