Strategic customer behavior in a two-stage batch processing system

Olga Bountali () and Antonis Economou ()
Additional contact information
Olga Bountali: University of Toronto
Antonis Economou: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, 2019, vol. 93, issue 1, No 2, 3-29

Abstract: Abstract We consider a two-stage service system with batch processing. More specifically, customers arrive according to a Poisson process at the first stage of the system, where they do not receive any service, but wait until a number K of them are accumulated. Then, these K customers form a batch which is instantaneously transferred to the second stage where the batches are served sequentially, as single units, by a single server. We derive customer equilibrium strategies, regarding the joining/balking dilemma, for the (partially) observable case where the customers are informed upon arrival about the number of present customers at the first stage. We prove the existence and study the uniqueness of equilibrium strategies and give a simple procedure for their computation. Moreover, we juxtapose the customer strategic behavior in this system with the corresponding behavior in the unobservable system and study the effect of information on the resulting social welfare per time unit under equilibrium.

Keywords: Queueing theory; Strategic customers; Batch services; Tandem queues; Balking; Equilibrium strategies; follow-the-crowd; avoid-the-crowd; Externalities; 90B22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11134-019-09615-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:queues:v:93:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s11134-019-09615-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11134/

DOI: 10.1007/s11134-019-09615-0

Access Statistics for this article

Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications is currently edited by Sergey Foss

More articles in Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().