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 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...

A classic example that illustrates how observed customer behavior impacts other customers' decisions is the selection of a restaurant whose quality is uncertain. Customers often choose the busier restaurant, inferring that other customers in that restaurant know something that they do not. In an...

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 firm’s choice of service rate in the following environment. The firm may have high or low quality, and sells a good to consumers who are heterogeneously informed. Consumers arrive according to a Poisson process and are serviced in a random period of time. If a consumer arrives...

Customers often wait in queues before being served. Since waiting is undesirable, customers may come back later (i.e., retry) when the queue is too long. However, retrial attempts can be costly due to transportation fees and service delays. This paper introduces a framework for rational retrial...

In many service settings, customers have to join the queue without being fully aware of the parameters of the service provider (for e.g., customers at check-out counters may not know the true service rate prior to joining). In such “blind queues”, customers make their joining/balking...

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,...