The impact of reneging on a fluid on-off queue with strategic customers.

In the recent strategic queueing literature, there is a large number of papers that study the join-or-balk dilemma in queueing systems with server's on-off periods, modeling vacations and failures. These studies consider the customers as discrete units and adopt the assumption that reneging is not permitted. In the present paper, we depart from this framework and study the effect of the reneging option in such systems. We consider the fluid on-off model of the basic queue with vacations/failures and study reneging vs. no-reneging when customers are strategic. We derive the equilibrium customer strategies and the corresponding performance measures of the system, and we use them to study the equilibrium throughput and social welfare. The main finding is that the existence of the reneging option is very beneficial for overloaded systems, i.e., for such systems balking alone is not sufficient to achieve good outcomes. On the contrary, for underloaded systems the reneging option is not particularly valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]