Antworten zum Universum

A Pareto Optimal Choice

Wait, wait, wait!! Before you go “again, Chewxy blogging about his groceries pattern”, this is not about MY groceries. But yes, you’d guess right, I’m going to talk about some economics in this one.

The reason for this blog is because I read Dan Meyer’s blog article about optimizing queues in, well, a supermarket. Of course Dan’s blog is more interesting, because he went out and collected empirical data on queues.

Well, me being me, and having insomnia (and desperately needing to do something about my I’m-so-lazy funk), I hacked up a simulator to find out how to choose the best line.

I made 3 types of shoppers: the Random Walk shopper, the Smart shopper and the Even Smarter shopper. This is how they choose their lines:

• The Random Walk shopper randomly chooses a checkout line. He doesn’t care about how many people are there or how many items are there in the line
• The Smart shopper chooses the shortest line. He doesn’t care about how many items each person has in the line
• The Even Smarter shopper looks at each line. He randomly picks 3 or less shoppers in each line and gauges their number of items, then chooses the line with what he thinks has the least number of queuers with the least number of items. I think this heuristic is realistic (woo that rhymes), because humans cannot possibly have perfect knowledge.

I assume that all goods take the same time to scan, which takes 1 second. Which is what Dan himself assumed. Of course, he also assumed perfect information, which I didn’t. And because I don’t assume perfect knowledge, this exercise to find the best queue to be in is done by means of iterative simulation, as opposed to just finding the minima of each session. Continue reading Which Line To Choose At Supermarket Checkouts