Week 11: Abolishing the queue
Appointments, lotteries and auctions do not remove waiting. They change who does it and what it costs them.
17 May 2027
This is the last teaching lecture, and it is the one that arms The Redesign.
There is a fairly persistent belief out there that a well-designed system simply has no queue at all. It is worth taking seriously for an hour, because the alternatives to queueing are real enough, they are very widely used, and each one of them turns out to be a different answer to the question we opened the course with.
The four alternatives#
Appointments. Move the wait off the premises and into the calendar. The waiting still happens; it happens at home, where it is invisible to the provider and free to them. It also converts a queue into a set of deadlines, which introduces no-shows, which introduces overbooking, which introduces a queue.
Lotteries. Allocate by chance rather than by arrival. A lottery is startlingly fair on one definition of fairness and unacceptable on another, which is why it turns up for exactly those goods where we cannot agree on a ranking. Housing, visas, school places and festival tickets are all allocated this way somewhere.
Auctions and markets for position. Let people pay to go first. The efficiency argument is strong and the objection is stronger, and both are about the same fact, which is that willingness to pay is not the same thing as need.
Prediction and smoothing. Do not change the discipline, change the arrivals. Staggered opening, dynamic pricing, published wait times that shift demand. Week 3 says this is the cheapest lever and almost nobody pulls it first.
The menu on one page#
| Instead of a queue | Where the waiting goes | Who it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Appointments | Into the calendar, at home, invisible and free to the provider | Anyone whose schedule is not their own |
| Lotteries | Nowhere. It becomes chance instead of time | Whoever is both urgent and unlucky |
| Paid position | Into money | Anyone who cannot pay, plus everybody behind |
| Smoothing demand | It genuinely shrinks | Whoever gets pushed into the off-peak slot |
Only the fourth row removes waiting rather than moving it, and it is the one almost nobody tries first.
The thing they have in common#
None of them removes the waiting. Each one relocates it, hides it, or converts it into money or luck. That is the sentence to have in your head when you write your redesign, because your redesign is going to do one of those four things whether you meant it to or not.
After this lecture#
You can name the four things a redesign can do instead of shortening a queue, and say which of them your own change is actually doing. That sentence is what The Redesign is marked on, and it is due in eleven days.
Teaching team
- Tessa Varga, Convenor