In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers’ experience, along with other strategic instruments such as the price they charge for their service. The objective of this paper is to conduct an empirical study of an important industry to measure to what extent waiting time performance impacts different firms’ market shares and price...

We study the market partition between two distinct firms that deliver services to waiting-time sensitive customers. In our model, the incoming customers select a firm on the basis of its posted price, the expected waiting time and its brand. More specifically, we quantify by a cost any departure from the ideal brand expected by each incoming customer. Considering that the two underlying queuein...

In many service systems, customers are not served in the order they arrive, but according to a priority scheme that ranks them with respect to their relative “importance.” However, it may not be an easy task to determine the importance level of customers, especially when decisions need to be made under limited information. A typical example is from health care: When triage nurses classify patie...

In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers’ experience, along with other strategic instruments such as the price they charge for their service. The objective of this paper is to conduct, what we believe to be the first, empirical study of an important industry to test whether and to what extent waiting time performance measures...

In business decision-making, the queuing system is one of options employed to satisfy demands a particular service for resource needs. The theory has been used successfully by various industries. There are many types systems that can predict waiting times and queue lengths. First Out (FIFO) algorithm works like principle, where first customer arrive served first. To mitigate negative effects wa...

We study a queueing system having a mixture of a special semi-Markov process (SSMP) and a Poisson process as the arrival process, where the Poisson arrival is regarded as interfering traffic. It is shown by numerical examples that the SSMP customers receive worse treatment than Poisson customers, i.e., the mean waiting time of SSMP customers is longer than that of Poisson customers. We also pro...

Queueing theory is concerned with developing and investigating mathematical models of systems where customers wait for service. The terms customers and servers are generic. Customers could, for example, be humans waiting in a physical line or waiting on hold on the telephone, jobs waiting to be processed in a factory, or tasks waiting for processing in a computer or communication system. Exampl...

For recurrent service providers (fast-food, entertainment, medical care,...), retaining loyal customers is obviously a key issue. The customers’ loyalty essentially depends on their service satisfaction defined via an ad-hoc utility function. Among several criteria, the utility function strongly depends on the past perceived waiting time. Moreover, the patience that customers consent to allow i...