“We Will Be Right with You”: Managing Customer Expectations with Vague Promises and Cheap Talk
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Delay announcements informing customers about anticipated service delays are prevalent in service-oriented systems. How delay announcements can influence customers in service systems is a complex problem that depends on both the dynamics of the underlying queueing system and on the customers' strategic behavior. We examine this problem of information communication by considering a model in which both the firm and the customers act strategically: the firm in choosing its delay announcement while anticipating customer response, and the customers in interpreting these announcements and in making the decision about when to join the system and when to balk. We characterize the equilibrium language that emerges between the service provider and her customers. The analysis of the emerging equilibria provides new and interesting insights into customer-firm information sharing. We show that even though the information provided to customers is nonverifiable, it improves the profits of the firm and the expected utility of the customers. The robustness of the results is illustrated via various extensions of the model. In particular, studying models with incomplete information on the system parameters allows us also to highlight the role of information provision in managing customer expectations regarding the congestion in the system. Further, the information could be as simple as “high congestion”/“low congestion” announcements, or it could be as detailed as the true state of the system. We also show that firms may choose to shade some of the truth by using intentional vagueness to lure customers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it