Humans Are Not Machines: The Behavioral Impact of Queueing Design on Service Time

Using behavioral experiments, we examined the impact of dispensability of effort and salience of feedback on worker productivity and how they can be managed via queueing design. We considered two queue design features: queue structure that can either be parallel queues (multiple queues with a dedicated server per queue) or a single queue (a single pooled queue served by multiple providers); and queue-length visibility that can either provide full or blocked visibility. We explored the impact of these two design decisions on worker productivity. We find that 1) the parallelqueues structure speeds up the servers, which challenges the common operations wisdom regarding superiority of the single-queue structure; and 2) poor visibility of the queue length slows down the servers; however, this effect may be mitigated, or even reversed, by pay schemes that incentivize the servers for fast performance.