Please don't make me wait! Influence of customers' waiting preference and no‐show behavior on appointment systems

Appointment systems are widely adopted in many service organizations. The simplest and most common format is the equally‐spaced (ES) system, in which the inter‐appointment times between consecutive arrivals are equal. One major drawback of such a system is the long expected waiting time for later arrivals, which makes later appointment positions unappealing to customers. As a result, customers who take these positions are more likely to abandon their appointments, leading to a higher no‐show rate. To address this issue, we examine a novel equal‐waiting (EW) scheduling system under which the expected waiting times are equal across appointments. Through a series of controlled lab experiments, we establish that the EW system increases the attractiveness of later appointments and that customers who are willing to take these appointments are more likely to show up. We then incorporate this individual‐level preference and no‐show behavior into models to evaluate its impact on the system‐level performance. We find that, compared with the traditional ES system, the EW system can significantly increase customers' show‐up rate and improve system utilization.