Clubs as status symbol: Would you belong to a club that accepts you as a member

We present a stylised model that goes beyond traditional analyses involving crowding and exclusiveness, and addresses the status issue by asking 'Do I want to be associated with those individuals?' rather than 'Do I want to be associated with that many individuals?'. As the population cares more about status, exclusion from well-defined groups/clubs occurs: less desirable individuals are refused. Inability to exclude induces the most desirable individuals to leave, and the club collapses. Offering honorary membership to the most desirable potential members is not only a commercially optimal strategy when exclusion is not allowed, it even outperforms exclusion as a revenue maximisation strategy

Dynamic Capacity Adjustments with Reactive Customers

In this paper we develop a behavioural model in which customers come and go based on their perception of waiting time (relative to other facilities) while managers gradually adjust the capacity of the facility based on their perception of demand. We explicitly account for the difference in access to information between existing and potential customers, which implies that the perception of potential customers lags the perception of current customers. We investigate the outcome of the interaction between these simultaneous dynamic decision processes, and in particular the impact of the lags created by the perception formation process and the time to implement desired changes in capacity. These multiple delays may result in customers and service provider being out of step: customers walk away just as the service provider manages to bring extra capacity online

Mode Locking and Chaos in a Deterministic Queueing Model with Feedback

We consider a simple, deterministic queueing system with feedback, which exhibits the phenomena of sustained oscillation, mode locking, quasi-periodic behaviour, and chaos. This implies that a fully deterministic queueing system can exhibit seemingly unpredictable behaviour. We ignore variability, and focus on two forms of feedback: (i) the service rate increases as queue length increases, and (ii) the arrival rate depends on customers' perception of past waiting times. We model a customer's decision to seek service as a two-stage process: (i) deciding whether or not to use a facility, and (ii) deciding the frequency of visit (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). This frequency is initially constant, and later on replaced by a deterministic, time-dependent pattern. Although highly stylised, this model captures the essential features of many real-life systems whose average arrival rate varies over time. Reducing the amplitude of cycles in demand makes the system more predictable and thus easier to manage. Although we represent this model as a queue of customers waiting for service, the model can be interpreted more generally as any situation where an increase in demand lowers the quality of service