IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ejores/v291y2021i3p1024-1040.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Strategic customer behavior in a queueing system with alternating information structure

Author

Listed:
  • Dimitrakopoulos, Yiannis
  • Economou, Antonis
  • Leonardos, Stefanos

Abstract

Strategic customer behavior is strongly influenced by the level of information that is provided to customers. Hence, to optimize the design of queueing systems, many studies consider various versions of the same service model and compare them under different information structures. In particular, two extreme versions are usually considered and compared: the observable in which customers are informed about the number of customers in the system and the unobservable in which they are only informed about the system parameters, e.g., arrival and service rates. In the present work, we study a model that bridges these two versions. More concretely, we assume that the system alternates between observable and unobservable periods. We characterize and compute customer equilibrium joining/balking strategies and show that the present model unifies and extends existing approaches of both heterogeneously observable models and models with delayed observations. More importantly, our findings indicate that an alternating information structure implies in general higher equilibrium throughput and social welfare in comparison to both the observable and unobservable cases. We complement our results with numerical experiments and provide managerial insight on the optimal control of the system parameters.

Suggested Citation

  • Dimitrakopoulos, Yiannis & Economou, Antonis & Leonardos, Stefanos, 2021. "Strategic customer behavior in a queueing system with alternating information structure," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 291(3), pages 1024-1040.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:291:y:2021:i:3:p:1024-1040
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.10.054
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221720309474
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.10.054?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Siddharth Prakash Singh & Mohammad Delasay & Alan Scheller‐Wolf, 2023. "Real‐time delay announcement under competition," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 32(3), pages 863-881, March.
    2. Antonis Economou, 2022. "How much information should be given to the strategic customers of a queueing system?," Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 100(3), pages 421-423, April.
    3. Antonio Di Crescenzo & Barbara Martinucci & Paola Paraggio, 2023. "Vessels Arrival Process and its Application to the SHIP/M/ $$\infty$$ ∞ Queue," Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 1-33, March.
    4. İşlier, Zeynep Gökçe & Güllü, Refik, 2024. "On strategic customers with correlated utility attributes: Effects and information benefits," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 313(1), pages 258-269.
    5. Tunçalp, Feray & Güneş, Evrim D. & Örmeci, E. Lerzan, 2024. "Modeling strategic walk-in patients in appointment systems: Equilibrium behavior and capacity allocation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 313(2), pages 587-601.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:291:y:2021:i:3:p:1024-1040. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.