A stochastic analysis of goods allocation by queuing and the prevention of violence
Amitrajeet Batabyal and
Gamini Herath
Economics Bulletin, 2010, vol. 30, issue 4, 3143-3151
Abstract:
When demand for a good exceeds its supply, queuing mechanisms are commonly used to allocate the good in question to citizens. However, very long queues result in excessive wait times and this can lead to violence. As such, the purpose of this paper is to analyze two stochastic models of goods allocation with queuing and the possibility of violence. In the first model, there is no capacity constraint. Using this model, we compute the long run delay per citizen in allocating the pertinent good. Next, we discuss the computation of the equilibrium probabilities for our discrete-time Markov chain theoretic model. In the second model, we capture the violence aspect of the underlying story explicitly with a capacity constraint. Then, we compute the long run fraction of citizens who are not provided the relevant good and the long run fraction of time the good allocating public official is busy.
Keywords: Capacity Constraint; Goods Allocation; Queuing Mechanism; Scarcity; Violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11-27
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2010/Volume30/EB-10-V30-I4-P289.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: A stochastic analysis of goods allocation by queuing and the prevention of violence (2010) 
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:ebl:ecbull:eb-10-00587
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().