A Psychological Perspective on Service Segmentation Models: The Significance of Accounting for Consumers' Perceptions of Waiting and Service

Ziv Carmon, Jevaveerasingam Shanthikumar and Tali F. Carmon
Additional contact information
Ziv Carmon: Marketing Group, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706
Tali F. Carmon: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720

Management Science, 1995, vol. 41, issue 11, 1806-1815

Abstract: We examine how service should be divided and scheduled when it can be provided in multiple separate segments. We analyze variants of this problem using a model with a conventional function describing the waiting cost, that is modified to account for some aspects of the psychological cost of waiting in line. We show that consideration of the psychological cost can result in prescriptions that are inconsistent with the common wisdom of queuing theorists derived according to the conventional approach (e.g., equal load assignments). More generally, our intention in this paper is to illustrate that aspects of the psychological cost of waiting can be accounted for in the analysis of queuing systems, and that this may have significant implications for the service schemes that are derived.

Keywords: queuing; psychology of waiting; dissatisfaction; workload allocation; service ordering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.41.11.1806 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:41:y:1995:i:11:p:1806-1815

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().