Although product advertising has been widely studied and understood in relation to the consumer’s purchase decision, advertising may also have unintended but important societal and economic consequences. In this paper, we examine a public health outcome — birth rate — associated with...

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number...

Traditional models of operations management involve dynamic decision-making assuming optimal (Bayesian) updating. However, behavioral theory suggests that individuals exhibit bias in their beliefs and decisions. We conduct both a field study and two laboratory studies to examine the phenomena in...

Does hospital advertising influence patient choice and health outcomes? We examine more than 220,000 individual patient-level visits over 24 months in Massachusetts to answer this question. We find that patients are positively influenced by hospital advertising; seeing a television advertisement...

From Frederick Taylor's study of brick laying manual laborers in the early 20th century, to the multi-year benchmarking of automotive plant productivity as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program, the systematic observation, measurement, and analysis of work has a strong tradition in...

In this study, we examine the hospital’s ability to admit patients from its emergency department. From a medical perspective, the number of patients being admitted should depend solely on the patients’ clinical conditions. Using a large scale econometric study that includes detailed...

The current state of outpatient healthcare delivery is characterized by capacity shortages and long waits for appointments. Yet a substantial fraction of valuable doctors’ capacity is wasted due to no-shows. In this paper, we examine the effect of wait to appointment on patient flow,...

This paper examines the effect of multitasking on overall worker performance, as measured by processing time, throughput rate, and output quality using micro-level operational data from the field. Specifically, we study the multitasking behavior of physicians in a busy hospital emergency...

One key driver of improvement in surgical outcomes is a surgeon’s prior experience. However, research notes that not all experience provides equal value for performance. How then should surgeons accumulate experience to improve quality outcomes? In this paper we investigate the differential...

We use hospital level discharge data from cardiac patients in California to estimate the effects of focus on operational performance. We examine focus at three distinct levels of the organization – at the firm level, at the operating unit level, and at the process flow level. We find that...