No abstract

T he traditional operations management and queueing literature typically assumes that customers are fully rational. In contrast, in this paper we study canonical service models with boundedly rational customers. We capture bounded rationality using a model in which customers are incapable of accurately estimating their expected waiting time. We investigate the impact of bounded rationality from both a profit-maximizing firm's perspective and a social planner's perspective. For visible queues with the optimal price, bounded rationality results in revenue and welfare loss; with a fixed price, bounded rationality can lead to strict social welfare improvement. For invisible queues, bounded rationality benefits the firm when its level is sufficiently high. Ignoring bounded rationality, when present yet small, can result in significant revenue and welfare loss.

P robabilistic or opaque selling, whereby a seller hides the exact identity of a product until after the buyer makes a payment, has been used in practice and received considerable attention in the literature. Under what conditions, and why, is probabilistic selling attractive to firms? The extant literature has offered the following explanations: to price discriminate heterogeneous consumers, to reduce supply-demand mismatches, and to soften price competition. In this paper, we provide a new explanation: to exploit consumer bounded rationality in the sense of anecdotal reasoning. We build a simple model where the firm is a monopoly, consumers are homogeneous, and there is no demand uncertainty or capacity constraint. This model allows us to isolate the impact of consumer bounded rationality on the adoption of opaque selling. We find that although it is never optimal to use opaque selling when consumers have rational expectations, it can be optimal when consumers are boundedly rational. We show that opaque selling may soften price competition and increase the industry profits as a result of consumer bounded rationality. Our findings underscore the importance of consumer bounded rationality and show that opaque selling might be even more attractive than previously thought.

The existing queueing literature typically assumes that customers either perfectly know the expected waiting time or are able to form rational expectations about it. In contrast, in this article, we study canonical service models where customers do not have such full information or capability. We assume that customers lack full capability or ample opportunities to perfectly infer the service rate or estimate the expected waiting time, and thus can only rely on past experiences and anecdotal reasoning to make their joining decisions. We fully characterize the steady‐state equilibrium in this service system. Compared with the fully rational benchmark, we find that customers with anecdotal reasoning are less price‐sensitive. Consequently, with a higher market potential (higher arrival rate), a revenue‐maximizing firm may increase the price if the service rate is exogenous, and it may decrease the price if the service rate is at the firm's discretion. Both results go against the commonly accepted pricing recommendations in the fully rational benchmark. We also show that revenue maximization and welfare maximization lead to fundamentally different pricing strategies with anecdotal reasoning, whereas they are equivalent in the fully rational benchmark.