A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Advance Reservations

Advance reservation is a fundamental paradigm for resource allocation. It is employed in various economic sectors, including cloud computing and communication networks. Although advance reservations are widespread, little is known about the strategic behavior of users facing the decision whether to reserve a resource in advance or not. In this article, we present a game-theoretic framework, called advance reservation (AR) games, to analyze this strategic behavior. We use AR games to analyze the impact of pricing, charging, and information sharing policies on the economic equilibria of the system and on its dynamic behavior. The analysis yields several insights on how a service provider should design a system that supports advance reservations.