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Cutting in Line: Social Norms in Queues

Author

Listed:
  • Gad Allon

    (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208)

  • Eran Hanany

    (Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel)

Abstract

Although the norm in many retail banks is to serve customers on a first-come, first-served basis, some customers try to cut the line, usually by providing an excuse for their urgency. In other queues, however, this behavior is considered unacceptable and is aggressively banned. In all of these cases, customer exhibit strategies that have not yet been explored in the operations literature: they choose whether or not to cut the line and must also decide whether to accept or reject such intrusions by others. This paper derives conditions for the emergence of such behavior in equilibrium among the customers themselves, i.e., when the queue manager is not involved in granting priorities and the customers have to use community enforcement to sustain such equilibria. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.

Suggested Citation

  • Gad Allon & Eran Hanany, 2012. "Cutting in Line: Social Norms in Queues," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(3), pages 493-506, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:58:y:2012:i:3:p:493-506
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1110.1438
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Moshe Haviv & Binyamin Oz, 2018. "Self-Regulation of an Unobservable Queue," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(5), pages 2380-2389, May.
    3. Sezer Ülkü & Chris Hydock & Shiliang Cui, 2022. "Social Queues (Cues): Impact of Others’ Waiting in Line on One’s Service Time," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(11), pages 7958-7976, November.
    4. Vasco F. Alves, 2021. "Endogenous queue number determination in G/M/s systems," 4OR, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 113-126, March.
    5. Yu-Li Lin & Hsiu-Wen Liu & Phuoc-Thi Ngo, 2016. "Silence is not Golden: The Effects of Prohibitive Voice on Customer Citizenship Behaviors," International Business Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 9(9), pages 24-33, September.
    6. Luyi Yang & Laurens Debo & Varun Gupta, 2017. "Trading Time in a Congested Environment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(7), pages 2377-2395, July.
    7. Jie Zhou & Jun Li, 2017. "An M/E k /1 queues with emergency non-preemptive priority of a diagnostic resource," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 1-16, April.
    8. Brett Alan Hathaway & Seyed Morteza Emadi & Vinayak Deshpande, 2022. "Personalized Priority Policies in Call Centers Using Past Customer Interaction Information," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(4), pages 2806-2823, April.
    9. Brett A. Hathaway & Seyed M. Emadi & Vinayak Deshpande, 2021. "Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You: An Empirical Study of Caller Behavior Under a Callback Option," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(3), pages 1508-1526, March.
    10. William P. Barnett & Daniel A. Levinthal, 2017. "Special Issue Introduction: Evolutionary Logics of Strategy and Organization," Strategy Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 1-1, March.
    11. Haeussler, Carolin & Vieth, Sabrina, 2022. "A question worth a million: The expert, the crowd, or myself? An investigation of problem solving," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(3).

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