Title
Auctioning and selling positions: A non-cooperative approach to queueing conflicts.
Abstract
Complementary to the axiomatic and mechanism design studies on queueing problems, this paper proposes a strategic bargaining approach to resolve queueing conflicts. Given a situation where players with different waiting costs have to form a queue in order to be served, they firstly compete with each other for a specific position in the queue. Then, the winner can decide to take up the position or sell it to the others. In the former case, the rest of the players will proceed to compete for the remaining positions in the same manner; whereas for the latter case the seller can propose a queue with corresponding payments to the others which can be accepted or rejected. In this paper we show that, when the players are competing for the first position in the queue, then the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome of the corresponding mechanism coincides with the well-known maximal transfer rule, while an efficient queue is always formed in equilibrium. We also argue that changing the mechanism so that the players compete for the last position implements the minimal transfer rule. The analysis discovers a striking relationship between pessimism and optimism in this type of decision making.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.jet.2014.05.007
Journal of Economic Theory
Keywords
DocType
Volume
C71,C72,D60
Journal
153
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0022-0531
1
0.36
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuan Ju1567.07
Youngsub Chun29420.80
René Van Den Brink318727.06