Analysis and Comparison of Queues with Different Levels of Delay Information
研究顾客在无信息、部分信息（系统占用数）和完全信息（确切等待时间）三种延迟信息水平下的排队决策，分析并比较系统性能，发现更准确的信息有时反而损害服务提供者或顾客利益。
Information about delays can enhance service quality in many industries. Delay information can take many forms, with different degrees of precision. Different levels of information have different effects on customers and therefore on the overall system. To explore these effects, we consider a queue with balking under three levels of delay information: no information, partial information (the system occupancy), and full information (the exact waiting time). We assume Poisson arrivals, independent exponential service times, and a single server. Customers decide whether to stay or balk based on their expected waiting costs, conditional on the information provided. We show how to compute the key performance measures in the three systems, obtaining closed-form solutions for special cases. We then compare the three systems. We identify some important cases where more accurate delay information improves performance. In other cases, however, information can actually hurt the provider or the customers.