Monopoly Pricing of Capacity Usage Under Asymmetric Information

The design of monopoly pricing strategies is examined in a general framework with an unknown population distribution of consumer characteristics and downward-sloping, multi-unit consumer demand. In addition, the monopolist has increasing marginal cost. Three pricing strategies are shown to implement the profit-maximizing allocation: reference point pricing, multi-unit competitive bidding with variable outputs, and generalized priority service. The analysis of pricing also is extended to include random capacity.