Real-time delay announcement under competition

Internet-based technology enables firms to disseminate real-time delay information to delay-sensitive customers. We study how such delay announcements impact service providers in a competitive environment with two service providers who compete for market share. We model the service providers' strategies based on an endogenous timing game, investigating strategies that emerge in equilibrium. We determine the service providers' market shares under the various game outcomes by analyzing continuous-time Markov chains, which capture customers' joining decisions, and by developing a novel computational technique to analyze the intractable asymmetric Join-the-Shortest Queue system, providing bounds on the market shares. We find that only the lower capacity service provider announces its real-time delay under intermediate system loads and highly imbalanced capacities. However, for most parameter settings, the mere presence of a competitor induces both providers to announce delays in equilibrium, leaving customers better off on average. We relate our findings to the single-provider delay announcement literature by discussing the impact of competition on service providers, delay announcement technology firms, and customers.