Hypothesis …part deux
nHow bad do users feel about unpredictable pricing? In between these extremes there is dynamic pricing - you can offer users a spot price instead of a futures price - users dont like this much (we have done some experiments...) but sometimes they'll buy into it -
nThen adapt the user’s behaviour instead of the application’s behaviour - whether you can do this enough to make the mean to peak ratio low enough without incurring the wrath of users; (unpredictable price is nearly as bad as unpredictable call success/blocking probablity) is the slightly more variable version of problem 1.