A temporal advantage can be used as an approximation of subjective perceptions. While a person may find themselves in a relevant queue before others due to luck, a time advantage is often an indicator of the effort expended to get the allocated resource, i.e., an investment of time, energy and money.164 The fact that someone got a time advantage may indicate that their efforts were greater than those of their competitors. In turn, effort serves as an approximation for three of the four factors mentioned above. Effort as a prize reflects the expected benefit to the individual resulting from the use of the allocated resource.165 Instead of outbidding others, individuals who gain a time advantage simply outperform them and may even spend more money than others to get there first, while forgoing other lucrative opportunities. Effort can also be closely correlated with subjective perceptions of needs and abilities. That is, if a person has a particular need for an asset or skill to use it, they are likely to put more effort into standing in line earlier.166 Hundreds of customers lined up for hours outside the luxury watch store on Saturday. [Daily Mail] In addition, we are now seeing queues on ecommerce platforms. When shopping online, consumers are redirected to a website`s checkout page. In some cases, they have to wait in a queue to checkout. This is common when buying tickets for shows or concerts online. Online queue management systems are often used for such purchases, which helps control website and app traffic and improve the overall consumer experience. The benefit of reducing idleness must be weighed against the cost of immediate allocation to the «wrong» parties, i.e.

the least needy, the least skillful, etc. Therefore, FIFOs can be attractive if the cost of its alternatives – in terms of inactivity of the allocator or participant or resource – is greater than the cost of allocation to bad parties by FIFO. Think, for example, of organ transplants. Any delay in the allocation process may affect participants and the resource. Waiting for better matches can harm sick patients and available organs. Assigning organs based on FIFO rather than waiting for the best matches has certain advantages, and the benefit of time is actually factored into such allocations.227 A written statement filed in a court or appellate case explaining a party`s legal and factual arguments. Second, the importance of equal respect for individual time is manifested in the common understanding that a person who leaves the queue and wants to return at a later date must go to the end of the line. Otherwise, that person has free time while the other queues wait, which means that that person`s time is more valuable than that of others. Similarly, in cases of prolonged waiting—a marathon queue where a temporary absence from the queue may be unavoidable—for example, to fetch food or use the toilet, downtime is limited, as an unreasonable absence means that the absentee`s time is more valuable than that of other queues.100 However, Even determining a time advantage can be difficult. Sometimes you don`t know what a person needs to do to be considered «first.» For example, should title to land be given to the first person to register a transaction or to the first person to declare it?213 Should a patent be granted to the first applicant or the first to invent?214 In Pierson v. Post,215 a right of ownership should be granted to the first person to intercept the fox in order to «make escape impossible»216, or the first to have a «reasonable eyesight.

217 Should ownership of a whale be granted to the first to attach it to the vessel («fast and bulk fish» rule)218 or to the first to attach a harpoon (the «iron holds the whale» rule, adopted in Swift v. Gifford219)? In addition, it is not always clear whether the associated asset is part of the flow from a particular source or from the source itself. For example, should we give ownership of a single barrel of oil to the first person to bring it to the surface, or should we give ownership of the entire tank to the first successful driller? Social or even legal norms must and will answer these questions in order to allow the self-administration of the parties. These difficulties therefore do not compromise the relative advantage of FIFO. Subjecting potential and actual beneficiaries to different allocation methods produces different effects, which in turn affect social welfare. In this subsection, we examine these impacts, distinguishing between those that occur before and after the actual allocation. We start with this last point and ask whether those who receive resources via queues will use them in ways that maximize well-being, while explaining how individual responses to allocation mechanisms provide approximations of the objective or subjective value of resources. We then examine the ex ante effects and explain how the application of FIFO allocation rules leads to both benefits and waste resulting from the queue and the resulting behaviours. When E.B. White The Elements of Style, one of the most influential guides to the use of English in the twentieth century, said, «I hate the bowels of English grammar.» Anyone who has studied the language might agree. English is interesting to say the least – it`s full of idioms, complicated grammatical rules, unusual sentence patterns and homophones.