Information overload and human priority queuing

In today's regime of information overload, it is reasonable to model a human executing routine tasks such as responding to emails as a priority queue. Humans typically prioritize task execution based on intrinsic motivators such as interest in the task, as well as extrinsic motivation stemming from the importance of the task to the sender. We view the human priority queue from the perspective of a principal-agent problem and characterize the effect of misalignment between the task sender's and task receiver's priorities. Our model provides insights into how different levels of misalignment affect delays of tasks of varying importance. Further, our approach starts to quantitatively address the effect of human dynamics in routine communication tasks, such as responding to emails. © 2014 IEEE.