Strategic Behavior and Social Outcomes in a Bottleneck Queue: Experimental Evidence

Jesper Breinbjerg (), Alexander Sebald () and Lars Peter Østerdal
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Jesper Breinbjerg: Department of Business and Economics, Postal: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark

No 12/2014, Discussion Papers on Economics from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics

Abstract: We consider a class of three-player queuing games where players independently choose when to arrive at a bottleneck facility that serves only one at a time. Players are impatient for service but cannot arrive before the facility opens and they dislike time spent in queue. We derive the equilibrium arrivals under the first-in-first-out (FIFO), last-in-first-out (LIFO), and service-in-random-order (SIRO) queue disciplines and compare these equilibrium predictions to outcomes from a laboratory experiment. LIFO provides higher equilibrium welfare than FIFO and SIRO since the players arrive such that lower congestion is induced. Experimental evidence confirms that employing different queue disciplines indeed affects the strategic behavior of players and thereby the level of congestion. The experimental participants do not, however, behave as prescribed by the equilibrium predictions. They obtain significantly higher welfare than prescribed by equilibrium under all queue disciplines. Our results moreover suggest that people perceive LIFO as the most unfair of the three disciplines although the theoretical results suggest that it is welfare optimal.

Keywords: Queue disciplines; congestion; equilibrium; experiments; fairness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D62 D63 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2014-08-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Strategic behavior and social outcomes in a bottleneck queue: experimental evidence (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2014_012

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