Bounded Rationality in Service Systems

The traditional economics and queueing literature typically assume that customers are fully rational. In contrast, in this paper, we study canonical service models with boundedly rational customers. We capture bounded rationality using a framework in which better decisions are made more often, while the best decision needs not always be made. We investigate the impact of bounded rationality on social welfare and revenue of a profit maximizing firm when the queue is visible and not visible to the customers. For invisible queues, from the firm’s perspective, higher irrationality always leads to higher optimal prices and higher revenue when customers are sufficiently irrational. From the social planner’s perspective, there may be strictly positive social welfare losses when customers are sufficiently irrational. For visible queues with a fixed price, we prove that a little bit of irrationality can lead to strict social welfare improvement, and we provide a simple inequality under which this improvement happens. With the optimal prices, however, irrationality always decreases social welfare, and a little bit of irrationality always results in revenue losses.