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How to make queues speed up: is first-come first-served efficient?




Three long lines of people form queues to gain entry into a concert. How can the queues speed up so that a person doesn’t have to wait ‘forever’?

First-come first-served is the usual response to long queues. But Danish researchers suggest another way (Quartz, September 7, 2015). Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark published their study in the journal Discussion Papers on Business and Economics.

The Danish researchers think the first-come first-served principle is a ‘curse.’ They think the first-come first-served model makes people arrive early, which means that they wait for a long time. They say it is not a good incentive to get to the queue first.

What would happen if people could line up at any time – i.e. remove the incentive of getting to the queue early? Theoretically the researchers wanted to try a last-come first-served model.

Researchers found that a last-come first served model was more efficient. With this model, people are forced to change their behaviour in order to arrive at the queues at a slower rate. When people who arrived last are served first there is less bottleneck and less congestion in queues.

In another study also published in the journal Discussion Papers on Business and Economics, researchers examined three queuing systems: (1) first-come first-served, (2) last-come first-served, and (3) service-in-random-order from the queue.

To test the three scenarios 144 volunteers were asked to queue according to the three options. The ‘starting’ point was the first-come first-served scenario, and an average waiting time was recorded (scenario 1). When participants were told that they would be served at random from the queue (scenario 3), the average waiting time decreased. The waiting time decreased further under the last-come first-served system (scenario 2) – this was because most people did not want to risk arriving too early only to be served first.

However, when researchers measured how fair participants felt about each of the three queuing systems, the first-come first-served model (scenario 1) was considered to be the fairest system. The last-come first-served system (scenario 2) was regarded as the least fairest system of queuing.

So is it best to fair or best to be efficient? Even when participants were told the results of all three scenarios, they still preferred the traditional first-come first-served method of queuing.

http://qz.com/496525/danish-researchers-have-an-enraging-proposal-to-speed-up-queues-serve-the-last-person-first/


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