Together with co-author Sander Onderstal (ABS Professor of Marketing & Strategy), Dr El Haji proposes auctions to allow people to trade places in a queue or waiting list.

The research is based on the premise that ‘It is well known that queues where customers are served on a first‐come first‐served basis are an inefficient way to ration scarce service time.’ In their paper, the authors conclude that in terms of efficiency when allocating scarce resources, ‘The results from our experiment demonstrate that customers can benefit from auction mechanisms that allow them to trade places.’

Their paper Trading places: An experimental comparison of reallocation mechanisms for priority queuing was published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy.