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 conduct an empirical study to analyze how waiting in queue in the context of a retail store affects customers’ purchasing behavior. Our methodology combines a novel dataset with periodic information about the queuing system (collected via video recognition technology) with point-of-sales...