When Service Times Depend on Customers’ Delays: A Relationship Between Two Models of Dependence
研究了服务系统中两种依赖机制（服务需求随等待时间变化、服务与耐心时间外生相关）对系统性能的影响，并提出了从删失数据中识别依赖来源和拟合联合分布的方法。
When Service Times Depend on Customers’ Delays: A Relationship Between Two Models of Dependence Service times of customers often depend on the delay they experience in queue, as was recently demonstrated empirically in restaurants, call centers, and intensive care units. Two forms of dependence mechanisms in service systems with customer abandonment are studied in this paper: First, the service requirement of a customer may evolve while waiting in queue. Second, customers may arrive to the system with an exogenous service and patience time that are stochastically dependent. Because either dependence mechanism can have significant impacts on a system's performance, it should be identified and taken into consideration for performance evaluation and decision-making purposes. However, identifying the source of dependence from observed data is hard because both the service times and patience times are censored due to customer abandonment. Further, even if the dependence is known to be the latter exogenous one, there remains the difficult task of fitting a joint service-patience times distribution to the censored data. In “When Service Times Depend on Customers’ Delays: A Relationship Between Two Models of Dependence”, Wu, Bassamboo, and Perry provide a solution to address these statistical challenges.