Strategic Decisions in Directed Networks: Experiments on Queueing, Route Choice, and Departure Time

This book collects and integrates the results of an extensive research program conducted by the authors over the past two decades. It spans the disciplines of transportation science, operations management, and behavioral economics, and consists of 16 chapters previously published in peer-reviewed academic journals and grouped under three topical sections: queueing, route choice, and departure time. The book focuses on strategic interactions in directed networks and laboratory experiments carefully designed to test the descriptive validity of the underlying theoretical models. The research question that unifies the chapters is: do the conclusions of theoretical literature account for the decisions of network users in controlled laboratory experiments? With several major qualifications, this book answers this question affirmatively.

About the Author :
Amnon Rapoport is a Professor Emeritus of Management and Organizations at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in Quantitative Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mostly grounded in game theory, his current research focuses on dynamic pricing, sequential decision making, social dilemmas, and choice of routes in traffic networks. He is the author and editor of nine books, more than 200 journal papers and 30 book chapters.Eyran J. Gisches is a Senior Lecturer in Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, where he also received his PhD in the same discipline. His research focuses on non-cooperative decision making in operations management and topics such as transportation networks, queueing, and revenue management. His work has been published in academic journals in operations management and economics.Vincent Mak is a Professor of Marketing and Decision Sciences at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. He has previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, from where he obtained his PhD in Marketing. His research explores how people and firms make strategic decisions as they interact with each other, and what economic and psychological factors influence those decisions. His research articles have appeared in journals in the fields of economics, psychology, management, and transportation research.