The early bird gets the worm, they say – an adage long-despised by the chronically late.

But latecomers may now be able to take heart from a research paper published by two economists at the University of Southern Denmark, which proposes to turn the accepted wisdom of first-come, first-served on its head.

In a paper titled The curse of the first-in-first-out queue discipline, economists Trine Tornoe Platz and Lars Peter Osterdal argue that the best method of serving a queue is to serve the last person first.

"Not fair!", you might cry, but as the paper argues, the problem with first-come, first-served is that it gives people an incentive to join the queue early, which hurts everyone in the queue because it increases the overall wait time.