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Korean Academic Society of Business Administration
[ Article ]
korean management review - Vol. 52, No. 6, pp.1253-1271
ISSN: 1226-1874 (Print)
Print publication date 31 Dec 2023
Received 22 Aug 2023 Accepted 11 Sep 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2023.52.6.1253

Whether or Not to Allow Preoccupation of Seats in Cafeteria Queues

Seung Bum Soh
(First Author) School of Business, Yonsei University sbsoh@yonsei.ac.kr
카페테리아 대기행렬 내 좌석 선점 허용 문제 연구


Copyright 2023 THE KOREAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Our queueing model is motivated by cafeterias where food and seats are provided. Cafeterias vary according to the policy they impose on the preoccupation of seats: customers are either allowed to secure the seats before the food or they should first obtain the food and next take the seats. We analyze the problem of selecting the policy that results in higher social welfare using a stylized fluid model. First, the dynamics of the system are identified in both of the policies. These results are used to construct stationary states of the system. Finally, the social welfares in the stationary states from both of the policies are compared and it turns out that the social welfares are identical and the choice of the policy is irrelevant of the efficiency.

Keywords:

Queueing system, Behavioral queueing theory, Fluid approximation, Cafeteria, Service system

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∙ The author Seung Bum Soh is an Assistant Professor of Management Science at Yonsei Business School. He graduated from the College of Business at Seoul National University, where he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. He obtained his PhD degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He served as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the department of Industrial Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and as an Assistant Professor at Sejong University. His main research interests include queueing theory, recommendation systems and portfolio management.