Cutting in Line: Social Norms in Queues

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Allon, Gad; Hanany, Eran
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; Tel Aviv University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1110.1438
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 493-506
• 关键词: Queues; games; Group decisions; social norms

摘要

Although the norm in many retail banks is to serve customers on a first-come, first-served basis, some customers try to cut the line, usually by providing an excuse for their urgency. In other queues, however, this behavior is considered unacceptable and is aggressively banned. In all of these cases, customer exhibit strategies that have not yet been explored in the operations literature: they choose whether or not to cut the line and must also decide whether to accept or reject such intrusions by others. This paper derives conditions for the emergence of such behavior in equilibrium among the customers themselves, i.e., when the queue manager is not involved in granting priorities and the customers have to use community enforcement to sustain such equilibria.