We theoretically and experimentally study the secretary problem under competition, focusing on the effect of two market design choices: i) transparency about agents’ priorities; and ii) the mechanism to collect decisions (simultaneous vs. sequential). Our results show that the latter affects the saliency of competition and induces frustration. Moreover, we theoretically show that transparency may lead to higher welfare, but the benefits do not translate to practice due to information friction.

We propose and analyze a stochastic model of service interactions that captures two (a)symmetries between the customer and agent: co-production vs self-production, synchrony vs asynchrony. This model reveals connection to the behavioral operations literature, such as non-monotonic system performance from monotonic agent-load slowdown, yielding insights for decision making and analysis.

In this paper, we investigate how line-sitting and express lines affect customers' satisfaction and fairness perceptions. We show that customers who encounter line-sitting report higher satisfaction with their overall experience than those who encounter an express-line customer, despite the actual wait time being the same. Moreover, we find that the effect of queueing schemes on customer satisfaction is mediated by differences in fairness perception.