TITLE:
Modeling Customer Reactions to Congestion in Competitive Service Facilities
AUTHORS:
Mohammad Saidi-Mehrabad, Ebrahim Teimory, Ali Pahlavani
KEYWORDS:
Competitive Planning Models, Customers’ Choice Behavior, Congestion, Waiting Time
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Service Science and Management,
Vol.3 No.2,
June
29,
2010
ABSTRACT: This paper reviews classic approaches for modeling customers’ choice behavior in competitive facility planning problems. They are either deterministic or probabilistic and work by a utility function based on some factors whether customer-independent or dependent. This paper focuses especially on congestion, the most important factor in customer to service or fixed-server systems. Various behaviors which customers may divulge when they face with a congested facility are extensively studied. We also define a new congestion-sensitivity reaction which has not been considered in the literature. Relevant modeling approaches are proposed to formulate customers-sensitivity to congestion. An illustrative example is also given to analyze and compare the proposed approaches.