Punctuality

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Punctuality is the characteristic of being able to complete a required task or fulfil an obligation before or at a previously-designated time.

There is often an understanding that a small amount of lateness is acceptable; commonly ten or fifteen minutes in Western cultures. In some cultures, such as Japanese society, or in the military there basically is no allowance.

Some cultures have an unspoken understanding that actual deadlines are different from stated deadlines; for example, it may be understood in a particular culture that people will turn up an hour later than advertised. In this case, since everyone understands that a 9am meeting will actually start around 10am, no-one is inconvenienced when everyone turns up at 10am.

In cultures which value punctuality, being late is tantamount to showing disrespect for another's time and may be considered insulting. In such cases, punctuality may be enforced by social penalties, for example by excluding low-status latecomers from meetings entirely.

Punctuality, time value and queueing theory

In many situations the requirement for punctuality is asymmetric. For example, in a doctor's clinic or airport, customers are expected to turn up on time for their appointment or lose it, yet may be kept waiting for an unspecified time before they can see the doctor or board the plane. This can be regarded as an assessment of the relative value of the provider's time and that of the customer, the exact value of which can be determined by a combination of queueing theory and game theory.

If the relative value was different, it would be easy to reduce waiting times by providing extra planes or doctors, and under-utilizing them, at the cost of increasing the price of travel or medical treatment proportionately. This can be seen in the behavior of the wealthy, who can afford to hire private planes and have doctors who visit them, rather than vice versa, and in the extreme case of the ultra-rich, to have their own personal physicians and dedicated private planes and flight crews who wait on their needs exclusively.

This expression of punctuality as a relative valuation of personal time value may be the reason for the description, often attributed to Louis XVIII, of punctuality as "the politeness of kings".

See also

• Time management
• Time discipline
• Deadline
• Value of time
• Etiquette

External links

• BBC News article about Punctuality
• Kaushik Basu, Jörgen W. Weibull MIT Department of Economics Working Paper No. 02-26: Punctuality: A Cultural Trait as Equilibrium. MIT Department of Economics. .
• M. Brahimi, D. J. Worthington Queueing Models for Out-Patient Appointment Systems -- A Case Study. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 42, No. 9 (Sep., 1991), pp. 733-746. .
• Andrew Chamberlain The economics of punctuality. The Idea Shop. .

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Last updated on Monday February 18, 2008 at 13:15:13 PST (GMT -0800)
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