On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion

Queues where people misreport their private information to access service faster are everywhere. Motivated by
\nthe prevalence of such behaviour in practice, we construct a queueing-game-theoretic model where customers
\nmake strategic claims to reduce their waiting time, and the Manager decides on the static scheduling policy
\nbased on those claims to minimize the expected delay cost in the system. We develop a lying aversion model
\nwhere customers incur both delay and lying costs. We run controlled experiments to validate our modelling
\nassumptions regarding customer misreporting behaviour. In particular, we find that people do incur lying
\ncosts, and that their misreporting behaviour does not depend on changes in waiting times, but rather on the
\nscheduling parameters. Based on the validated lying aversion model, we study the equilibrium that arises
\nin our game. We find that under certain conditions, the optimal policy is to use an honor policy where
\nservice priority is given according to customer claims. We also find that it may be optimal to incentivize
\nmore honesty by means of an upgrading policy where some customers who claim to not deserve priority are
\nupgraded to the priority queue. We find that the upgrading policy deviates from the celebrated cµ rule.