The paper examines prioritization in a queuing system and analyzes whether, in the presence of heterogeneous customers and a costly sorting process, it pays to prioritize. In particular, in our model, the task of gathering information to prioritize/sort jobs consumes resources. We investigate a...

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...

Many service systems exhibit service slowdowns when the system is congested. Our goal in this paper is to investigate this phenomenon and its e ffect on service performance. We modify the Erlang-A model to account for service slowdowns and perform an asymptotic analysis in the Quality-and-E...

To study the effect of congestion on the fundamental trade-off between diagnostic accuracy and speed, we empirically test the predictions of a formal sequential testing model in a setting where the gathering of additional information can improve diagnostic accuracy, but may also take time and...

The traditional queueing literature assumes that service time is largely independent of social influences. However, queues are social systems; and social considerations are therefore likely to impact customers' service-time decision to the extent they have control. Through a series of...

We analyze a service firm that caters to price and delay sensitive customers who are differentiated on both their value for the service and the cost of waiting. There is a continuum of customer types in our setting and we model each customer's cost of waiting to be linear in the delay incurred...

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,...