A classic example that illustrates how observed customer behavior impacts other customers' decisions is the selection of a restaurant whose quality is uncertain. Customers often choose the busier restaurant, inferring that other customers in that restaurant know something that they do not. In an...

We consider a firm’s choice of service rate in the following environment. The firm may have high or low quality, and sells a good to consumers who are heterogeneously informed. Consumers arrive according to a Poisson process and are serviced in a random period of time. If a consumer arrives...

In many service settings, customers have to join the queue without being fully aware of the parameters of the service provider (for e.g., customers at check-out counters may not know the true service rate prior to joining). In such “blind queues”, customers make their joining/balking...

We consider a monopolist expert offering a service with a 'credence' characteristic. A credence service is one where the customer cannot verify, even after purchase, whether the amount of prescribed service was appropriate or not; examples include legal, medical or consultancy services and car...