Equilibrium customer strategies in Markovian queues with partial breakdowns

•Study the equilibrium strategic behavior in the M/M/1 queues with partial breakdowns.•Two different levels of information provided to arriving customers have been investigated extensively.•Nash equilibrium and the equilibrium balking strategies for all customers are provided.•The effect of the information levels is illustrated by extensive numerical examples.•It provides insight into the optimal design and control of the related queueing systems.

We consider equilibrium analysis of a single-server Markovian queueing system with working breakdowns. The system may become defective at any point of time when it is in operation. However, when the system is defective, instead of stopping service completely, the service continues at a slower rate. We assume that the arriving customers decide whether to join the system or balk based on a natural reward-cost structure. With considering waiting cost and reward, the balking behavior of customers is investigated and the corresponding Nash equilibrium strategies are derived. The effects of the information level on the equilibrium behavior are illustrated further via numerical experiments.