An Extension of Osuna's Model for Stress Caused by Waiting

In an attempt to model the accumulation of stress caused by waiting, Osuna (1985) postulated that anxiety stems from a perceived harm or loss to the person's well being that he represented by an increasing function of the total time to service. This paper proposes an extension of this model to situations in which the psychological cost of waiting is not functionally related to time but merely correlated with it. It is shown that the properties of Osuna's model recently reexamined by Suck and Holling (1997) remain valid in this broader framework. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.