Article ID: | iaor20172103 |
Volume: | 63 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 1762 |
End Page Number: | 1780 |
Publication Date: | Jun 2017 |
Journal: | Management Science |
Authors: | Armony Mor, Bassamboo Achal, Ibrahim Rouba |
Keywords: | behaviour, marketing, forecasting: applications, markov processes, queues: applications |
Motivated by the recent interest in making delay announcements in large service systems, such as call centers, we investigate the accuracy of announcing the waiting time of the last customer to enter service (LES). In practice, customers typically respond to delay announcements by either balking or by becoming more or less impatient, and their response alters system performance. We study the accuracy of the LES announcement in single‐class, multiserver Markovian queueing models with announcement‐dependent customer behavior. We show that, interestingly, even in this stylized setting, the LES announcement