We explore customer choice behavior when they face a choice between service providers of unknown service value. Customers arrive according to a Poisson process to the market. Service times are exponentially distributed with the same rate at each service provider. Both the service providers are...

We study the impact of wait time on consumers' purchasing behavior when product quality is unknown to some consumers (the 'uninformed consumers'), but known to others (the 'informed consumers'). In a capacitated environment, wait times act as a signal of quality for uninformed consumers because,...

In this paper, we study how rational agents infer the quality of a good (a product or a service) by observing the queue that is formed by other rational agents to obtain the good. Agents also observe privately the realization of a signal that is imperfectly correlated with the true quality of...

We consider a monopolist expert offering a service with a 'credence' characteristic. A credence service is one where the customer cannot verify, even after purchase, whether the amount of prescribed service was appropriate or not; examples include legal, medical or consultancy services and car...

We study a single queue joining equilibrium when there is uncertainty in the consumers' minds about the service rate and value. Without such uncertainty, the joining equilibria are characterized by means of a single threshold queue length above which consumers do not join (Naor, 1969). We show...