Abstract: Queues where people misreport their private information to access service faster are everywhere. Motivated by the prevalence of such behaviour in practice, we construct a queueing-game-theoretic model where customers make strategic claims to reduce their waiting time, and the Manager decides on the static scheduling policy based on those claims to minimize the expected delay cost in the system. We develop a lying aversion model where customers incur both delay and lying costs. We run controlled experiments to validate our modelling assumptions regarding customer misreporting behaviour. In particular, we find that people do incur lying costs, and that their misreporting behaviour does not depend on changes in waiting times, but rather on the scheduling parameters. Based on the validated lying aversion model, we study the equilibrium that arises in our game. We find that under certain conditions, the optimal policy is to use an honor policy where service priority is given according to customer claims. We also find that it may be optimal to incentivize more honesty by means of an upgrading policy where some customers who claim to not deserve priority are upgraded to the priority queue. We find that the upgrading policy deviates from the celebrated cmu rule.

Based on joint work with Arturo Estrada Rodriguez and Dongyuan Zhan from the UCL School of Management