Article ID: | iaor20032304 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 48 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 566 |
End Page Number: | 583 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2002 |
Journal: | Management Science |
Authors: | Mandelbaum Avishai, Shimkin Nahum, Zohar Ety |
Keywords: | behaviour, e-commerce |
We address the modeling and analysis of abandonments from a queue that is invisible to its occupants. Such queues arise in remote service systems, notably the Internet and telephone call centers; hence, we refer to them as tele-queues. A basic premise of this paper is that customers adapt their patience (modeled by an abandonment-time distribution) to their service expectations, in particular to their anticipated waiting time. We present empirical support for that hypothesis, and propose an