Patent ID: 7711657

Claim:
A method of establishing a pricing structure for reserving a resource, comprising: selecting, by a computing device, an option from among a plurality of available options with respect to delivery of a resource at a specified future time; and presenting the selected option to a customer, wherein each of the plurality of options includes: (i) a reservation price at which the customer reserves the resource, and (ii) a compensation amount that must be paid if the resource is not delivered at the specified future time, wherein the specified future time comprises at least one of a point in time and an interval of time, wherein for each of the plurality of options, both the reservation price and the compensation amount are nonzero, and wherein each of the plurality of options corresponds to an estimate that the resource will be provided at the specified future time, and for each of the plurality of options, the reservation price is set in accordance with a price function and the compensation amount is set in accordance with a compensation function, and wherein both the price function and the compensation function are functions of the estimate.