Equilibrium Arrival Times to Queues: The Case of Last-come First Serve Preemptive Resume

Jesper Breinbjerg, Lars Peter Østerdal

Research output: Working paperResearch

Abstract

We consider a non-cooperative queueing environment where a finite number of customers independently choose when to arrive at a queueing system that opens at a given point in time and serves customers on a last-come first-serve preemptive-resume (LCFS-PR) basis. Each customer has a service time requirement which is identically and independently distributed according to some general probability distribution, and they want to complete service as early as possible while minimizing the time spent in the queue. In this setting, we establish the existence of an arrival time strategy that constitutes a symmetric (mixed) Nash equilibrium, and show that there is at most one symmetric equilibrium. We provide a numerical method to compute this
equilibrium and demonstrate by a numerical example that the social effciency can be lower than the effciency induced by a similar queueing system that serves customers on a first-come first-serve (FCFS) basis.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationOdense
PublisherSyddansk Universitet
Number of pages22
Publication statusPublished - 2017
SeriesDiscussion Papers on Business and Economics
Number3/2017

Keywords

  • Queueing
  • Strategic arrival times to a queue
  • Non-cooperative games

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