Congratulations to Arturo Estrada Rodriguez, Rouba Ibrahim and Dongyuan Zhan on their paper being shortlisted as a finalist for two awards at the INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) conference, for the Behavioral Operations Management Best Working Paper award and the IBM Best Student Paper award. 

The paper; On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion uses controlled experiments and a stylised queueing model to examine priority queues, where customers strategically convey private information to access service faster.

The study is even more prominent when considering the recent example with the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, where there have been multiple recent reports of people ineligibly “jumping” COVID-19 testing queues by falsely claiming to be key workers.

Arturo, Rouba and Dongyuan examine the effect of lying aversion in customers reporting behaviour and derive the optimal prioritisation policy. They find that due to customers’ lying aversion, the optimal policy may deviate from the celebrated cμ rule (a standard prioritisation rule), which highlights the relevance of incorporating behavioural factors into standard models.

The authors suggest it may be optimal to upgrade (i.e., give higher priority to) some customers that do not claim to deserve service priority, in order to incentivise more honesty in the system.

Upon receiving the nominations Arturo said: “Being nominated for these awards represents a great satisfaction after two years of intense work in this project. It shows that the research community finds this line of research relevant and interesting. I am very grateful to my supervisors Rouba Ibrahim and Dongyuan Zhan for their support, guidance, and teaching.” 

The winners of the awards will be determined at the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting at the end of October, we wish Arturo and his co-authors the best of luck!