Routing and Staffing when Servers are Strategic
Ragavendran Gopalakrishnan, Sherwin Doroudi, Amy R. Ward and, Adam Wierman

TL;DR
This paper models strategic server behavior in queueing systems, analyzing how routing and staffing policies influence server effort, system equilibrium, and costs, revealing that quality-driven regimes are necessary for equilibrium and exploring alternative routing policies.
Contribution
It introduces a model for strategic servers choosing service rates based on effort and idleness, and characterizes equilibrium and optimal policies in this context.
Findings
Equilibrium exists only in quality-driven regimes with idle time.
Optimal staffing exceeds the standard square-root staffing policy.
Routing based on service rate can potentially improve performance.
Abstract
Traditionally, research focusing on the design of routing and staffing policies for service systems has modeled servers as having fixed (possibly heterogeneous) service rates. However, service systems are generally staffed by people. Furthermore, people respond to workload incentives; that is, how hard a person works can depend both on how much work there is, and how the work is divided between the people responsible for it. In a service system, the routing and staffing policies control such workload incentives; and so the rate servers work will be impacted by the system's routing and staffing policies. This observation has consequences when modeling service system performance, and our objective is to investigate those consequences. We do this in the context of the M/M/N queue, which is the canonical model for large service systems. First, we present a model for "strategic" servers…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Queuing Theory Analysis · Network Traffic and Congestion Control · Advanced Wireless Network Optimization
