Seminar by Athanasia Manou

Seminar by
Athanasia Manou
Koç University

 

 

Abstract:Before 1969, queueing theorists limited themselves to recommendations of admin- istrative measures for the reduction of queues. Namely, they assumed that arriving customers would always join a queueing system even if their expected waiting time was large. However, a more realistic assumption is that customers are willing to receive high-quality service and, on the other hand, they are not willing to wait for a long time in the queue. Moreover, customers are free to make decisions about their actions in the system, having as objective the maximization of their own benefit or the social benefit. The study of queueing systems with customers that have the option to make decisions was initiated by Naor (1969). After this work, an emerging tendency to study the behavior of customers that have the option to make decisions took place.

 

In this talk we present the behavior of strategic customers in transportation systems. We consider two different models. In the first model, arriving customers decide whether to join the station or balk, based on a natural reward-cost structure. Solving the game among customers, we determine their strategic behavior and explore the effect of key service parameters on cus- tomer behavior. In the second model, arriving customers decide whether to join the station or balk and the administrator sets the fee. In this case, a two-stage game among the customers and the administrator takes place. Moreover, we consider three cases distinguished by the level of delay information provided to customers at their arrival instants. We explore how system parameters affect the customer behavior and the fee imposed by the administrator. We then compare the three cases and show that the customers almost always prefer to know their exact waiting times whereas the administrator prefers to provide either no information or the exact waiting time depending on the system parameters.

Bio: Dr. Athanasia Manou is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at department of Industrial Engineering, Koç University, Turkey. She received the B.Sc. degree in Mathematics (2006), the M.Sc. degree in Operations Research (2009) and Ph.D. degree in Operations Research (December, 2014) all of them from National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece. Her research interests lie in the areas of Operations Research and Stochastic Processes. In particular, her main interests concern optimization and game theoretic aspects of stochastic systems with applications mainly in queueing systems. In 2014, she received the AXA Postdoctoral Research Fellowship award for a two-year project with topic ‘Strategic Customers in Public-Private Service Systems Subject to Uncertainty and Congestion: Equilibrium Analysis’.