Responsive Pricing

We study the eciency property of responsive pricing, a scheme that proposes to increase prices as a function of the level of capacity utilization in environments where traditional allocation schemes (e.g. competitive markets, auctions) cannot be implemented in practice. We show that although responsive pricing implements allocations that are arbitrarily close to full capacity utilization (no wasted capacity and no excess demand), these allocations are not always ecient. We identify conditions under which eciency occurs and discuss implications for the use of responsive pricing