Cutting in Line: Social Norms in Queues

Gad Allon () and Eran Hanany ()
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Gad Allon: Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
Eran Hanany: Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

Management Science, 2012, vol. 58, issue 3, 493-506

Abstract: 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. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.

Keywords: queues; games; group decisions; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:58:y:2012:i:3:p:493-506

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