Strategic Open Routing With Different Disutilities Between Waiting Lines

In this thesis we examine the occurrence of “herding” in open network services described in the paper by Arlotto et al. (2019). We analyze a simulation where customers arrive at different times and choose their route before they enter the system. We find that, under certain restrictions, customers learn to choose the same route as all the other customers, instead of preferring a strategy where they avoid the route that most other customers take. We further analyze what impact a change in disutility between the waiting time for the first line and for the second line has on the prevalence of “herding” in the simulation.