Decision biases in human queuing systems: a simulation model to use in the class

Abstract

Human decision-making is affected by cognitive decision biases that can deviate human behaviour from purely rational actions. These effects can alter the behaviour of systems in which humans are involved; that is the case of queuing systems of people. Traditional Queuing Theory studies the performance of such systems without taking into account the idiosyncrasy of the human decision-making processes. In this work, we propose an interactive simulation tool to teach decision biases in queuing systems. We present a series of experiments to be carried out in the class to explore the behaviour of a simple queuing system of people exposed to people cognitive biases and discuss the expected dynamics. The simulation tool is freely accessible from GitHub.