Social Welfare and Price of Anarchy in Preemptive Priority Queues
2020-07-01·
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0 min read
Dr. Jonathan Chamberlain
David Starobinski
Abstract
Consider an unobservable M|G|1 queue with preemptive-resume scheduling and two priority classes. Customers are strategic and may join the premium class for a fee. We analyze the resulting equilibrium outcomes, equilibrium stability, and social welfare. We find that for service distributions with coefficient of variation greater than 1, there exists a unique and stable mixed equilibrium at low loads. We also establish a tight bound on the price of anarchy, which is 4/3.
Type
Publication
Operations Research Letters
Authors
Dr. Jonathan Chamberlain
(he/him)
Unaffiliated Researcher
As a Graduate Research Fellow with BU NISLAB, I published a number of papers, including a paper in collaboration with the Ohio State ElectroScience Laboratory stablishing the economic feasibility of sharing for wholesale commercial markets yielding priority to mission critical Earth Exploration Satellite Service-passive (EESS-passive) radiometers which received the Runner-Up accolade for Best Paper on the Policy Track at IEEE DySpan 2024. I was also actively involved in multiple service roles, including serving on the executive board of the Boston University Student Association of Graduate Engineers in various roles, membering on an advisory committee providing feedback for university initiatives and proposed policy updates to the Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs, and co-organized the 10th and 11th editions of the BU Center for Information and Systems Engineering Graduate Student Workshops in 2024 and 2025. For these efforts, as well as my work mentoring students both within the NISLAB and in other projects as well as my published research, I was recognized with the BU ECE Department Doctoral Acheivement Award for the 2024-25 academic year. I additionally had the privilege of participating in the 2025 NSF NeTS Early Career Investigators workshop.