Strategic customers in Markovian queues with vacations and synchronized abandonment

Abstract

We study impatient customers’ joining strategies in a single-server Markovian queue with synchronized abandonment and multiple vacations. Customers receive the system information upon arrival, and decide whether to join or balk, based on a linear reward-cost structure under the acquired information. Waiting customers are served in a first-come-first-serve discipline, and no service is rendered during vacation. Server’s vacation becomes the cause of impatience for the waiting customers, which leads to synchronous abandonment at the end of vacation. That is, customers consider simultaneously but independent of others, whether to renege the system or to remain. We are interested to study the effect of both information and reneging choice on the balking strategies of impatient customers. We examine the customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal balking strategies under four cases of information: fully/almost observable and fully/almost unobservable cases, assuming the linear reward-cost structure. We compare the social benefits under all the information policies.

doi: 10.1017/S1446181120000115