The Queue Behind the Curtain: Information Disclosure in Omnichannel Services

With evolving mobile technologies, increasing number of firms are running multiple channels to serve customers. Due to the novelty of these systems, questions related to the design of such omnichannel systems and their implications for the firm and customers remain open. In particular, the question of whether or not a firm should disclose queue information to its customers in an omnichannel setting, has not been extensively addressed in prior literature. In this paper, we address some of these open questions of design of omnichannel service system, especially focusing on the issue of congestion information disclosure and its impact on customer channel choice behavior. We benchmark the omnichannel model against a conventional single channel model, and compare these settings in terms of the firm’s throughput and average consumer surplus.