Motivated by the impact of emerging technologies on (toll) parks, this paper studies a problem of customers’ strategic behavior, social optimization, and revenue maximization for infinite-server queues. More specifically, we assume that a customer’s utility consists of a positive reward for receiving service minus a cost caused by the other customers in the system. In the observable setting, we show the existence, uniqueness, and expressions of the individual equilibrium threshold, the socially optimal threshold, and the optimal revenue threshold, respectively. Then, we prove that the optimal revenue threshold is smaller than the socially optimal threshold, which is smaller than the individual one. Furthermore, we also extend the cost functions to any finite polynomial function with nonnegative coefficients. In the unobservable setting, we derive the joining probabilities of individual equilibrium and optimal revenue. Finally, using numerical experiments, we complement our results and compare the social welfare and the revenue under these two information levels.

We study impatient customers’ joining strategies in a single-server Markovian queue with synchronized abandonment and multiple vacations. Customers receive the system information upon arrival, and decide whether to join or balk, based on a linear reward-cost structure under the acquired information. Waiting customers are served in a first-come-first-serve discipline, and no service is rendered during vacation. Server’s vacation becomes the cause of impatience for the waiting customers, which leads to synchronous abandonment at the end of vacation. That is, customers consider simultaneously but independent of others, whether to renege the system or to remain. We are interested to study the effect of both information and reneging choice on the balking strategies of impatient customers. We examine the customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal balking strategies under four cases of information: fully/almost observable and fully/almost unobservable cases, assuming the linear reward-cost structure. We compare the social benefits under all the information policies.