| Abstract: | When service quality is unknown to customers, some customers might decide to pay for such information. Higher quality service can attract more customers and thus results in a longer queue. Consequently, the queue length might convey some information on quality of service to customers. As more customers pay for the quality information, shall a tagged customer follow such strategy or simply gain such information by inspecting the queue? We study customers’ equilibrium decision among three choices: buying information, directly joining or balking. We consider four information scenarios: Fully unobservable queue, informed customers inspect the queue, uninformed customers inspect the queue and fully observable queue. For each information scenario, we discuss the value of information and the uniqueness of equilibrium. (This work is co-authored with Moshe Haviv and Yulan Wang). |
| Date: | 18 September 2013 |
| Time: | 11:45am - 1:00pm |
| Speaker: |
Dr. Pengfei GUO Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| Venue: | Room 10-201; Business Analytics Lab C, 10th Floor, Academic 3 |
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