Tradable Reservations In Multi-Agent, Resource-Constrained Environments

Abstract

People waste a lot of time waiting in queues. Even when they go to places where they can make reservations, the reservations alone don't provide much flexibility. The purpose of this research is to show that the use of mobile devices, which allow us to improve planning, trade reservations and receive total information about queues, improves the social welfare. Several experiments were performed using a custom made simulator. The results of the experiments demonstrate that a simple reservation mechanism can even reduce the social welfare under certain conditions, but tradable reservations and clairvoyance each improve it. While in many situations queues are unavoidable, better information and more flexibility in reservation handling can improve the overall quality of societies use of these resources.