Abstract

We study priority queueing systems where customers may misreport their private information to shorten their expected waiting times. For example, such systems arise in healthcare settings where patients may exaggerate their own symptoms in order to be seen faster. We design an experiment where we find that customers are delay sensitive and that they incur psychological costs when they misreport their private information. Motivated by this experimental evidence, we consider a queueing model with delay-sensitive and cheating-sensitive customers, who may be inspected at random. We investigate optimal inspection and scheduling policies, and find that it is not necessarily optimal to eliminate customer dishonesty entirely, even when the inspection process is costless

Professor Rouba Ibrahim is a professor at the School of Management of University College London. She specializes in the study of queueing systems with applications to service systems, such as healthcare systems and call centers. She is an associate editor of Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing and Operations Management, and IISE Transactions.

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