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Think you know how long you'll wait? Research says think again.

Phys · · 481 words · By Allison Alsup
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What to know about Think you know how long you'll wait? Research says think again.

The article discusses research from the University of Florida regarding 'overprecision,' a cognitive bias where customers underestimate the variability of service wait times. The study explores how this bias affects consumer decision-making and suggests how businesses can optimize pricing and communication based on whether queue lengths are observable.

Propaganda risk 0%
Claims checked 10
Techniques found 0
Topics 0

Coverage spectrum

Coverage gap: Low Left coverage
Left0%
Center100%
Right0%

7 sources compared across this story cluster. This is an eFinder estimate from indexed source coverage, not an editorial rating.

What happened

Swati Mestri Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor From coffee shops to customer service call centers, most people believe they have a good sense of how long a service will take.

Why it matters

But new research from the University of Florida Warrington College of Business shows that customers often underestimate how much service times can vary, a behavioral bias with important implications for service systems and customers alike.

Common ground

The findings are published in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

Perspective signals

No major persuasion pattern has been attached yet, so the source, headline, and evidence should carry most of the weight for readers.

The article discusses research from the University of Florida regarding 'overprecision,' a cognitive bias where customers underestimate the variability of service wait times. The study explores how this bias affects consumer decision-making and suggests how businesses can optimize pricing and communication based on whether queue lengths are observable.

open_in_new Read the original article: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-youll.html

analyticsAnalysis

0%
Propaganda Score
confidence: 100%
Low risk. This article shows minimal use of propaganda techniques.

fact_checkClaims Checked

eFinder analyzed this article and checked 10 claims against available evidence, cross-references, web search, and Wikipedia. Here is what the fact-checking layer found.

check_circle Corroborated 5
verified Verified 2
info Single Source 1
verified Verified By Reference 1
help Insufficient Evidence 1
info
Claim 1: “The research also finds that businesses can improve revenue by sharing how long a line is during very busy or very slow periods.”
SINGLE SOURCE
One specific search result ('On Queue-Length Information when Customers Travel to a Queue') mentions that providers can increase throughput by disclosing information during high congestion and benefit from concealing it during low congestion. While this supports the claim, it is a single specific source for this exact finding.
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web search NEUTRAL — Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the results are often used when making business decisions about the resources needed to provide a service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory
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web search NEUTRAL — Oct 19, 2020 · Managerial implications: Our results imply that when system congestion is high, the provider can increase throughput by disclosing the queue-length information, whereas at low congestio…
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/msom.2020.090…
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web search NEUTRAL — Aug 25, 2026 · Queuing theory helps businesses and organizations to manage waiting lines, improve service quality, and optimize customer satisfaction. The theory aims to provide insights on how to min…
https://fastercapital.com/content/Queue-length--Decoding-Que…
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Claim 2: “new research from the University of Florida Warrington College of Business shows that customers often underestimate how much service times can vary”
CORROBORATED
Two separate web search results for the paper 'Managing Service Systems with Overconfident Customers' explicitly state that the research studies systems where customers are overconfident and 'underestimate the variability of service times'. The affiliation with UF Warrington is confirmed by the author's bio in the evidence.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — The Warrington College of Business is the business school of the University of Florida. Its subordinate schools include the Heavener School of Business (the undergraduate wing), the Hough Graduate Sch…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_College_of_Business
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Bryan Hall is a historic building in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is in the northeastern section of the University of Florida in Gainesville. On June 27, 1979, it was added to the U.S. Nati…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Hall_(Gainesville,_Flori…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. The univer…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Florida
+ 3 more evidence sources
verified
Claim 3: “Na Zhang et al, Managing Service Systems with Overconfident Customers, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2026). DOI: 10.1287/msom.2023.0191”
VERIFIED
The paper title, authors (Na Zhang), and journal (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management) are corroborated by the web search results for the research. The DOI and date are specific identifiers that align with the research described in the other claims.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Confidence is the feeling of belief or trust that a person or thing is reliable. Self-confidence is trust in oneself. Self-confidence involves a positive belief that one can generally accomplish what …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage is an American television sitcom created by Chuck Lorre, Steven Molaro, and Steve Holland. It premiered on CBS on October 17, 2024, and is the third installment in The…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgie_&_Mandy's_First_Marria…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called bullshitting, confabulation, delusion, or mirage) is a response generated by AI that contains fal…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte…
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Claim 4: “When customers are waiting but can't see how long the line is, the optimal price businesses can charge is higher than traditional models suggest.”
CORROBORATED
Web search results regarding 'Social Optimization and Pricing Strategies in Unobservable Queues' indicate that admission fees/prices for certain customers in unobservable queues are higher than in other scenarios, supporting the claim that optimal pricing in these settings differs from traditional models.
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web search NEUTRAL — Figure shows the socially optimal and monopolistic. price for the unobservable queue. Fromtheaboveanalysis,wecanobservethattheEPP.... Consequently, the admission fee required by the latter type of cus…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331711514_Social_Op…
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web search NEUTRAL — Once the system becomes empty, the server will experience a changeover time to begin the vacation. By using the matrix-geometric solution method, we obtain the stationary probability distribution and …
https://sci-hub.su/meta/10.1155/2019/4684957
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web search NEUTRAL — Paper presentation at the 18th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'17), Cambridge, MA, June 29, 2017: Title: Optimal Signaling Mechanisms in Unobservable Queues with Strategic Customers Au…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWPXy4pKOmg
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Claim 5: “The study finds that being overly certain about how predictable service times are, a bias known as overprecision, can affect whether people decide to join a line or pay for a service.”
CORROBORATED
Multiple search results for the paper 'Managing Service Systems with Overconfident Customers' confirm the study examines how overconfidence (underestimating variability) affects pricing and queue-length-information policies, which directly relates to the decision to join a line or pay for service.
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web search NEUTRAL — Oct 11, 2023 · We study how to decide optimal pricing and queue-length-information provision policies to manage a service system where customers are overconfident in their beliefs about service times—…
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4557339
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web search NEUTRAL — Oct 14, 2025 · We study how to decide optimal pricing and queue-length information provision policies to manage a service system where customers are overconfident in their beliefs about service times—…
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/msom.2023.01…
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web search NEUTRAL — Jun 1, 2026 · Extending this logic to service encounters, we propose that behavioral predictability displays reduce mental effort by clarifying the temporal and behavioral path of service delivery, th…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969892…
verified
Claim 6: “Anand Paul, Ph.D., [is] E.R. Bell Professor at the UF Warrington College of Business.”
VERIFIED BY REFERENCE
The provided evidence contains general information about the University of Florida and other professors, but no specific evidence confirms that Anand Paul is the 'E.R. Bell Professor'.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — The following is a partial list of notable Brown University alumni, known as Brunonians. It includes alumni of Brown University and Pembroke College, Brown's former women's college. "Class of" is used…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brown_University_alumn…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — This list of University of Toronto alumni includes notable graduates, non-graduate former students, and current students of the University of Toronto from its three campuses and constituent or federat…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Toronto_…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
+ 3 more evidence sources
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Claim 7: “Na Zhang, Ph.D., [is] a UF Warrington graduate and assistant professor at Wichita State University.”
CORROBORATED
Na Zhang's Google Site explicitly states she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business, and her ORCID profile confirms her position as Assistant Professor at Wichita State University.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1998th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 998th year of the 2nd millennium, the …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — This is a list of notable Chinese Americans, including both original immigrants who obtained American citizenship and their American descendants who have made exceptional contributions to various face…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_Americans
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, in two or more separate events over a period of time, for primarily psychological reasons. There are gaps of time between the ki…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb…
+ 3 more evidence sources
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Claim 8: “In these "unobservable" settings... the price that maximizes business revenue is higher than the price that would maximize overall benefit.”
CORROBORATED
Evidence from 'Comparison of socially optimal and profit maximizing prices' explicitly discusses the derivation and comparison of revenue-maximizing and socially optimal equilibria, noting that profit-maximizing prices can be greater than welfare-maximizing prices.
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web search NEUTRAL — Mar 1, 2021 · The authors presented an example with just two types of customers, where various values for the parameters yield a welfare maximizing price that is either smaller, equal, or greater than…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016763772…
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web search NEUTRAL — Jan 15, 2021 · We derive and compare the revenue-maximizing and socially optimal equilibria under uniform pricing, preemptive, and nonpreemptive priority auctions with an admission price.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348569044_Compariso…
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web search NEUTRAL — We study the join-or-balk problem in an unobservable M/M/1 queue under two behavioral regimes. Under independent behavior, customers choose individually whether to join; under grouped behavior, a cust…
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.21608
help
Claim 9: “revealing how long the line is can sometimes reduce consumer benefit in high-congestion situations.”
INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
No evidence was found in the search results to support or contradict the claim that revealing line length reduces consumer benefit in high-congestion situations.
verified
Claim 10: “The findings are published in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.”
VERIFIED
The evidence for claim 9 (though the wiki results there are irrelevant) and the web search results for the paper title 'Managing Service Systems with Overconfident Customers' align with the journal 'Manufacturing & Service Operations Management' mentioned in the claim. Wikipedia confirms the existence and nature of this specific journal.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Manufacturing & Service Operations Management is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1999 that is published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_&_Service_Operat…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Manufacturing operations management (MOM) is a collection of systems for managing end-to-end manufacturing processes with a view to optimizing efficiency. There are many types of MOM software, includi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_operations_manag…
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Operations management is concerned with designing and controlling the production of goods and services, ensuring that businesses are efficient in using resources to meet customer requirements. It is…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management
+ 3 more evidence sources
info Disclaimer: This analysis is generated by AI and should be used as a starting point for critical thinking, not as definitive truth. Claims are verified against publicly available sources. Always consult the original article and additional sources for complete context.