Paul Zipkin and Pengfei Guo
Information about delays can
enhance service quality in many industries. Delay information can take many
forms, with different degrees of precision. Different levels of information
have different effects on customers and so on the
overall system. To explore these effects, we consider a queue with balking
under three levels of delay information: no information, partial information
(the system occupancy) and full information (the exact waiting time). We posit
that customers decide to balk or stay based on their expected costs of waiting,
given the information available, and on the values they obtain from service.
Customers are heterogeneous; they weight service and waiting differently. We
show how to compute the key performance measures in the three systems,
obtaining closed-form solutions for special cases.
In general, the customers and
the service provider have different, perhaps conflicting, objectives. Under
certain conditions, however, those objectives are perfectly aligned; they are
proportional to a single measure, the throughput. This measure improves with
more accurate information. In other cases, such harmony need not prevail. We
show that, even then, more information helps someone, but not
necessarily both parties.