On Customer (Dis-)Honesty in Unobservable Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion

Arturo Estrada Rodriguez (), Rouba Ibrahim () and Dongyuan Zhan ()
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Arturo Estrada Rodriguez: Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 1649-023 Lisbon, Portugal
Rouba Ibrahim: School of Management, University College London, London E14 5AB, United Kingdom
Dongyuan Zhan: School of Management, University College London, London E14 5AB, United Kingdom

Management Science, 2025, vol. 71, issue 1, 844-860

Abstract: Queues where people misreport their private information to access service faster are everywhere. Motivated by the prevalence of such behavior in practice, we construct a queueing-game-theoretic model where customers make strategic claims to reduce their waiting time and where the manager decides on the static scheduling policy based on those claims to minimize the expected delay cost in the system. We develop a lying-aversion model where customers incur both delay and lying costs. We run controlled experiments to validate our modeling assumptions regarding customer misreporting behavior. In particular, we find that people do incur lying costs, and we find that their misreporting behavior does not depend on changes in waiting times but rather, on the scheduling parameters. Based on the validated lying-aversion model, we study the equilibrium that arises in our game. We find that under certain conditions, the optimal policy is to use an honor policy where service priority is given according to customer claims. We also find that it may be optimal to incentivize more honesty by means of an upgrading policy where some customers who claim to not deserve priority are upgraded to the priority queue. We find that the upgrading policy deviates from the celebrated cµ rule.

Keywords: scheduling policy; priority queues; strategic customers; lying aversion; behavior in queues (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:71:y:2025:i:1:p:844-860

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