Strategically Seeking Service: How Competition Can Generate Poisson Arrivals

Abstract

A delay-sensitive customer prefers arriving for service when few or no other customers are in the system. We consider how such a customer should strategically arrive to a service system. We present a model in which strategic customers acting in a self-interested fashion give rise to Poisson arrivals.

Keywords: Poisson process, service management, queuing, game theory, mixed-strategy equilibrium