Comments on: recent developments in the queueing problem

From queues in a bank to waiting lists to enrol in child care, queues are in every part of our lives. In IT, queues arise when requests reach a system faster than it can process them. Waiting in a queue is costly and the cost may differ across people. How should a queue be formed so that the total waiting cost is minimized? If everyone in a queue is equally entitled for the service they are waiting for, then the question of fairness also arises. A person waiting at the back of the queue will obviously find the situation unfair and envy a person in the front. Can we utilize monetary transfers to restore fairness? Economic theory has developed answers to such questions. In a nutshell, a queueing problem is concerned with finding a “desirable” queuing rule that determines the order in which to serve agents and the (positive or negative) monetary transfers they should receive.