Customers' joining behavior in an unobservable <i>GI/Geo/m</i> queue

This paper studies the equilibrium balking strategies of impatient customers in a discrete-time multi-server renewal input queue with identical servers. Arriving customers are unaware of the number of customers in the queue before making a decision whether to join or balk the queue. We model the decision-making process as a non-cooperative symmetric game and derive the Nash equilibrium mixed strategy and optimal social strategies. The stationary system-length distributions at different observation epochs under the equilibrium structure are obtained using the roots method. Finally, some numerical examples are presented to show the effect of the information level together with system parameters on the equilibrium and social behavior of impatient customers.