10th Conference on Stochastic Models of Manufacturing and Service Operations

We consider a two-stage, feed forward open Jackson network with join topology. Customers arrive to stage 1 and make a decision which route to select, in order to maximize their expected net benefit, without observing the current system state. We formulate the problem as a symmetric join/balk game among customers, show existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium strategy and develop an algorithm to derive it. We also perform computational experiments to assess how the equilibrium is affected by the possibility of abandoning the system after stage 1.