Balking Strategies in an Observable Queue with Vacations ⋆

This paper compares the equilibrium threshold strategies of customers with different decision criteria in an observable queue with multiple vacations. Customers are not informed of the service time distribution and the state of the server, whereas they are told that the expected service time is an alternative of two values or the variable service time belongs to an interval. We find that both the forms of the thresholds based on each criterion are consistent for the two types of information, and verify that the minimax regret distribution of the service time is a uniform distribution if the partial information is an interval.