Z. Carmon et al., A PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SERVICE SEGMENTATION MODELS - THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ACCOUNTING FOR CONSUMERS PERCEPTIONS OF WAITING AND SERVICE, Management science, 41(11), 1995, pp. 1806-1815
Citations number
33
Categorie Soggetti
Management,"Operatione Research & Management Science
We examine how service should be divided and scheduled when it can be
provided in multiple separate segments. We analyze variants of this pr
oblem using a model with a conventional function describing the waitin
g cost, that is modified to account for some aspects of the psychologi
cal cost of waiting in line. We show that consideration of the psychol
ogical cost can result in prescriptions that are inconsistent with the
common wisdom of queuing theorists derived according to the conventio
nal approach (e.g., equal load assignments). More generally, our inten
tion in this paper is to illustrate that aspects of the psychological
cost of waiting can be accounted for in the analysis of queuing system
s, and that this may have significant implications for the service sch
emes that are derived.