On Customer (Dis-)Honesty in Unobservable Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Rodriguez, Arturo Estrada; Ibrahim, Rouba; Zhan, Dongyuan
• 署名单位: Universidade Catolica Portuguesa; University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.04036
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: scheduling policy; Priority Queues; Strategic Customers; lying aversion; behavior in queues

摘要

Queues where people misreport their private information to access service faster are everywhere. Motivated by the prevalence of such behavior in practice, we construct a queueing-game-theoretic model where customers make strategic claims to reduce their waiting time and where the manager decides on the static scheduling policy based on those claims to minimize the expected delay cost in the system. We develop a lying-aversion model where customers incur both delay and lying costs. We run controlled experiments to validate our modeling assumptions regarding customer misreporting behavior. In particular, we find that people do incur lying costs, and we find that their misreporting behavior does not depend on changes in waiting times but rather, on the scheduling parameters. Based on the validated lying-aversion model, we study the equilibrium that arises in our game. We find that under certain conditions, the optimal policy is to use an honor policy where service priority is given according to customer claims. We also find that it may be optimal to incentivize more honesty by means of an upgrading policy where some customers who claim to not deserve priority are upgraded to the priority queue. We find that the upgrading policy deviates from the celebrated cm rule.