  Today's queueing network systems are more rapidly evolving and more complex
than those of even a few years ago. The goal of this paper is to study
customers' behavior in an unobservable Markovian M/M/1 queue where consumers
have to choose between two strategic decisions about information acquisition
before joining or not the queue. According to their decision, customers decide
to give up the service (balk the system) or to join the queue. We study the
Nash equilibrium strategies: we compute the equilibrium and we prove its
existence and uniqueness. Based on this result, we consider the problem of
revenue maximization where the provider has to choose between two charging
mechanisms: to charge the access to the system or to charge the queue length
information to new incoming customers. We propose an heuristic algorithm to
solve the considered problem and numerical experiments have been conducted in
order to illustrate the result. We show that, depending on the sensitivity of
customers to their waiting time, the provider will change the pricing policy
used. Particularly, when customers are more sensitive then the provider will
charge the information instead of the access.
