The Handbook of Behavioral Operations

9Behavioral Foundations of Queueing Systems

Gad Allon¹ and Mirko Kremer²

¹ The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

² Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Frankfurt, Germany

9.1 Introduction and Framework

Understanding the behavior of queueing systems is important to both operations management academics and practitioners. Queueing systems have been studied extensively through the lens of formal mathematical models. Importantly, in most production and service settings, queueing systems involve human judgment and decision‐making. In this chapter, we review existing literature on the microbehavioral foundations of queueing systems. As will become apparent, research sharply focused on behavior(al anomalies) relevant for the understanding of how queueing systems work is abundant. But there is a noticeable disconnect between the work of queueing behavioralists (equipped mostly with empirical toolkits) and queueing theorists (equipped with formal modeling tools). One goal of this chapter is to bridge the gap or inspire future research that aims to bridge the gap.

The fundamental premise of this chapter is our belief that a robust understanding of individual‐level behaviors will have the most impact when it can meaningfully connect to the system‐level behavior and metrics that operations managers tend to care about, such as average wait times, throughput, or utilization. Evidently, it exceeds the scope of most individual research papers to identify ...