Efficient Ignorance: Information Heterogeneity in a Queue

Ming Hu (), Yang Li () and Jianfu Wang ()
Additional contact information
Ming Hu: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada
Yang Li: CUHK Business School, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
Jianfu Wang: Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798

Management Science, 2018, vol. 64, issue 6, 2650-2671

Abstract: How would the growing prevalence of real-time delay information affect a service system? We consider a single-server queueing system where customers arrive according to a Poisson process and the service time follows an exponential distribution. There are two streams of customers, one informed about real-time delay and the other uninformed. The customers’ uninformed behavior may be due to information ignorance or rational behavior in the presence of an information fee. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of customers with information heterogeneity and investigate how the presence of a larger fraction of informed customers affects the system performance measures, i.e., throughput and social welfare. We show that the effects of growing information prevalence on system performance measures are determined by the equilibrium joining behavior of uninformed customers. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that throughput and social welfare can be unimodal in the fraction of informed customers. In other words, some amount of information heterogeneity in the population can lead to more efficient outcomes, in terms of the system throughput or social welfare, than information homogeneity. For example, under a very mild condition, throughput in a system with an offered load of 1 will always suffer if there are more than 58% of informed customers in the population. Moreover, it is shown that for an overloaded system with offered load sufficiently higher than 1, social welfare always reaches its maximum when some fraction of customers is uninformed of the congestion level in real time.

Keywords: service operations; queueing games; heterogeneous delay information; social welfare; system throughput (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.287/mnsc.2017.2747 (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:64:y:2018:i:6:p:2650-2671

Access Statistics for this article

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