On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion

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On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion

Ibrahim, Rouba; Estrada Rodriguez, Arturo; Zhan, Dongyuan; (2024) On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion. Management Science (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Queues where people misreport their private information to access service faster are everywhere. Motivated by the prevalence of such behaviour in practice, we construct a queueing-game-theoretic model where customers make strategic claims to reduce their waiting time, and 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 modelling assumptions regarding customer misreporting behaviour. In particular, we find that people do incur lying costs, and that their misreporting behaviour 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.

Type:	Article
Title:	On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version:	https://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/mnsc
Language:	English
Additional information:	This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords:	Scheduling policy, priority queues, strategic customers, lying aversion, behaviour in queues.
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > UCL School of Management
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186222