Dear colleagues:
(Apologies for cross-posting.)
The purpose of this post is to announce a Special Issue in Queueing Systems on Queueing Systems with Strategic Agents: Modeling, Analysis, and Control.
Burak Buke, Antonis Economou and I will serve as Guest Editors.
The submission deadline is February 28, 2025, but we are already accepting submissions and are aiming for a 4-month review cycle time.
The announcement on the journal website is here: https://link.springer.com/journal/11134/updates/17193474.
You can also find the key info below and in this downloadable document: https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/27320086/data/v1.
We hope you will consider this special issue for some of your work.
Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions.
Philipp Afèche
Professor of Operations Management and Statistics
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Queueing Systems Special Issue
Queueing Systems with Strategic Agents: Modeling, Analysis, and Control
Guest Editors
Philipp Afèche, University of Toronto, afeche@rotman.utoronto.ca
Burak Büke, The University of Edinburgh, B.Buke@ed.ac.uk
Antonis Economou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens aeconom@math.uoa.gr
Background
Firms and platforms in many industries operate congestion‐prone systems that serve customers and/or rely on workers who act strategically, i.e., make self-interested demand and supply decisions. Therefore, the operation and performance of such systems critically depend on the interplay of the decentralized decisions of the strategic agents involved. Accordingly, the study of queueing systems with strategic agents via game-theoretic queueing models has enjoyed very fruitful activity for over 50 years, going back to the seminal paper by Naor (1969). Nevertheless, the rapid pace of innovation in business models, technology and data-driven decision-making models continues to create exciting and important novel research opportunities and challenges. The overarching objective of this Queueing Systems Special Issue is to showcase top-quality papers that advance the state-of-the-art along some of these directions.
Scope
We are particularly interested in papers that advance the state-of-the-art in the modeling, analysis and/or control of queueing systems with strategic agents, i.e., customers, firms and/or servers. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) innovations on some of the following dimensions:
- Models of customer and server behavior: bounded rationality, risk preferences, empirically or experimentally validated behavior models; hybrid workforces (incl. human/machine servers).
- Models of market relationships: among servers, firms, and customers.
- Learning and decision-making in models with parameter uncertainty.
- Decisions: design of service classes and allocation rules (queue disciplines, dynamic matching and routing); pricing and admission control; information provision; capacity level, mix and flexibility.
- Objectives: Equilibria under social optimization, profit/revenue maximization, fairness considerations and no control; related trade-offs (price of anarchy, price of fairness).
- Analysis: Approximation methods for joint performance/equilibrium analysis and optimization (stochastic process approximations, mean-field games).
We invite contributions to a wide variety of application areas, including healthcare, transportation, on-demand service platforms, omni-channel retailing, telecommunications, etc.
We welcome contributions from researchers of any affiliation/primary background, including those in departments or schools of economics, business, computer science and engineering, and mathematics and statistics.
Review Process and Timeline: Our overarching objective is to provide authors with timely and high-quality reviews.
Submission Deadline for Initial Manuscript: February 28, 2025
Review Process and Cycle Time
- Each submitted manuscript will first be reviewed by the Editors and then assigned to referees.
- We target a four month review cycle time per round. This also applies to papers submitted before February 28, 2025 (e.g., submissions in August 2024 can expect a decision by December 2024).
- We anticipate that most accepted papers will undergo no more than two revisions.
Publication
- Every accepted article will be published online soon after its acceptance.
- We anticipate publication of the full issue in Fall 2026.
Submission Process
Manuscripts must be submitted through the Queueing Systems submissions portal (link below). Please choose ‘S.I.: Queueing Systems with Strategic Agents’ to direct your manuscript to the guest editors for the review process.
Submissions portal: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ques/default.aspx
Author Instructions: https://www.springer.com/business+&+management/operations+research/journal/11134
Questions: Please do not hesitate to email the Guest Editors.