The paper examines prioritization in a queuing system and analyzes whether, in the presence of heterogeneous customers and a costly sorting process, it pays to prioritize. In particular, in our model, the task of gathering information to prioritize/sort jobs consumes resources. We investigate a...

The supply chain of a retailer selling a perishable product with a shelf life of two periods is modeled over an infinite horizon. In each period, the retailer has the option to sell old (leftover inventory from previous period) and new (produced fresh at the beginning of the period) products....

This paper examines the staffing, division of labor, and resulting profitability of primary care physician practices. We develop a theoretical model of how practice profit is determined by the number and mix of support staff and how tasks are delegated to support staff. A key element of the...

Many intensive care units (ICUs) face overcrowding. One response to this overcrowding is to bump ICU patients to other departments of the hopsital to make room for new patient arrivals. Such bumping clearly has the potential to reduce quality care. In this paper we develop a stochastic model of...