In this paper, we study the collision resolution protocol of the IEEE 802.16 standard for metropolitan broadband wireless access systems. The standard specifies the use of a random access scheme based on the slotted binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm during the bandwidth request phase. We analyze the distributed choice of the retransmission probabilities used by the BEB protocol. We follow a cooperative team problem approach towards the analysis of the throughput and the delay during the bandwidth reservation process. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain the optimal retransmission probabilities, the optimal value of the initial backoff window size, W min, the throughput and the expected delays experienced by a subscriber station (SS) for placing its bandwidth requests. We then investigate the impact of adding retransmission costs (which may represent the disutility for power consumption during bandwidth request phase), and show how this pricing can penalizes the throughput of a request transmission. © 2011 IEEE.