Queue Configurations and Operational Performance: An Interplay Between Customer Ownership and Queue Length Awareness.

This article investigates the operational performance differences between dedicated and pooled queue configurations in business-to-consumer (B2C) discretionary service settings, specifically within healthcare delivery. Through two preregistered online experiments involving fourth-year medical students and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers acting as physicians processing patient cases, the study finds that dedicated queues yield faster processing times without compromising quality compared to pooled queues. This performance advantage is partially mediated by increased queue length awareness—servers' more accurate perception of their workload—which motivates faster work, and partially suppressed by heightened customer ownership of those waiting in queue, which can distract servers and slow processing. Additionally, the benefits in processing speed and queue length awareness persist even after switching from a dedicated to a pooled queue configuration, suggesting practical implications for managers considering queue design changes in discretionary service environments.