Can Server Behavior and Service System Design Outweigh the Benefits of Pooling?

Do, Hung; Shunko, Masha; Lucas, Marilyn T.; Novak, David A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2606071

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Also, in their analysis of different dispatching policies in M/M/2 queues, Doroudi et al (2011) highlight the importance of incorporating strategic server behavior in managing queueing systems. Do et al (2015) use a theoretical model to study the impact of server behaviors, social loafing, and workload dependent speedup on the performance of dedicated queues and shared queues. They show that pooling may or may not lead to performance improvement.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Queue Configuration on Service Time: Evidence from a Supermarket

Wang

Zhou

2018

Management Science

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We study how queue configuration affects human servers' service time by comparing dedicated with shared queues using field data from a natural experiment in a supermarket. We hypothesize that queue configuration may affect servers' service rate through several mechanisms: pooling may affects service rate directly due to social loafing effect and competition effect, and indirectly via its impact on queue length. To investigate these impacts, we take advantage of the supermarket's checkout layout, and use a data set containing both checkout transaction details and queue information collected from video recordings in the supermarket. After we control for the queue length, we find that servers in dedicated queues are about 10.7% faster than those in shared queues, mainly due to the social loafing effect. We also demonstrate that pooling has an indirect negative effect on service time through its impact on queue length. In addition, the queue configuration's direct effect and its indirect queue length effect function independently to each other. In aggregation, the social loafing effect dominates, and servers slow down (a 6.86% increase in service time) in shared queues.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%