Although pooling queues offers in principle many operational benefits, these may not always be achieved in practice. One reason, observed in the empirical study by Song et al. (2015), relates to customer ownership. In this paper, we formalize these empirical observations by developing a...

In a multi-server, single-queue symmetric capacity choice game, Gopalakrishnan et al. (2016) characterize the existence of a Nash equilibrium under a requirement on the servers’ capacity cost functions, which excludes some highly relevant cases where servers have ample discretion over their...

Contrary to traditional queueing theory, recent field studies in health care and call centers indicate that pooling queues may not lead to operational efficiencies relative to dedicated queues. We use a series of three experiments to examine the conditions under which this may be the case and to...