Behavioral foundations of queueing systems

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of queueing systems is important to both operations management academics and practitioners. Queueing systems have been studied extensively through the lens of formal mathematical models. Importantly, in most production and service settings, queueing systems involve human judgment and decision-making. In this chapter, we review existing literature on the microbehavioral foundations of queueing systems. We survey the literature and show that research sharply focused on behavior(al anomalies) relevant for the understanding of how queueing systems work is abundant. But there is a noticeable disconnect between the work of queueing behavioralists (equipped mostly with empirical toolkits) and queueing theorists (equipped with formal modeling tools). One goal of this chapter is to bridge the gap or inspire future research that aims to bridge the gap.