Queuing Processes at Competing Service Facilities

Abstract

The queuing models constructed here have the feature that a service facility tends to lose its customers if they often encounter lengthy delays. Structurally, the arrival processes are assumed to depend on past waiting times, hence on past arrival and service processes. The cases investigated include a service facility with several competitors and a facility with very many competitors; these correspond roughly to oligopoly and to perfect competition in micro-economics. For the duopoly case, approximate analytical solutions are presented along with graphs for numerical solutions. A data sample is given that is moderately consistent with the duopoly model.