Ibrahim, R; Bassamboo, A; (2021) A General Framework to Compare Announcement Accuracy: Static vs LES-based Announcement. Management Science 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3722. (In press).

Preview

Text Final_draft_may_18_2020_nonblind.pdf - Accepted Version Download (951kB) | Preview

Abstract

Service providers often share delay information, in the form of delay announcements, with their customers. In practice, simple delay announcements, such as average waiting times or a weighted average of previously delayed customers, are often used. Our goal in this paper is to gain insight into when such announcements perform well. Specifically, we compare the accuracies of two announcements: (i) a static announcement that does not exploit real-time information about the state of the system and (ii) a dynamic announcement, specifically the last-to-enter-service (LES) announcement, which equals the delay of the last customer to have entered service at the time of the announcement. We propose a novel correlation-based approach that is theoretically appealing because it allows for a comparison of the accuracies of announcements across different queueing models, including multiclass models with a priority service discipline. It is also practically useful because estimating correlations is much easier than fitting an entire queueing model. Using a combination of queueing-theoretic analysis, real-life data analysis, and simulation, we analyze the performance of static and dynamic announcements and derive an appropriate weighted average of the two which we demonstrate has a superior performance using both simulation and data from a call center. .

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item