Institutions know all this, of course, which is why the waiting room is so rarely left to chance. It is tempting to call this irrational. It is more useful to ask what it is for. Economists have spent decades modelling regret as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system. Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception.
Three kinds of mistake
Notice how rarely anyone is argued out of the waiting room, and how often they are simply moved past it by a change in circumstance. If you want to see regret at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. A pattern this consistent is not a character flaw. It is a design feature, and design features can be worked with. There is a version of this essay that ends with a policy prescription. This is not that version; the mechanism is interesting enough on its own.
