In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the...

Distribution centers (DCs) replenish stores with size-specific ship-packs. The ship-packs may be eaches (i.e. individual units), inners (a group of individual units), or cases (a group of inners). The problem that we consider is to determine the ship-pack to use for each stock-keeping-unit. The...

We ask whether, in China, geographic location has explanatory power for firms' inventory turn, and why. To do this, we undertake a variance component analysis (VCA) of firm-level inventory turn, using a panel dataset of 1,531 unique Chinese firms spanning 1999-2008. Our identification arises...

This paper studies how to design service outsourcing contracts to ensure fast, quality services from an independent service provider. The outsourcer does not have perfect information about either the service provider's capacity cost (i.e., cost for providing fast service), or her quality cost...

Despite over a decade of attention on reducing medical errors sparked by the Institute of Medicine report, medical errors in hospitals remain prevalent. A plethora of potential solutions are suggested, yet their adoption rate is slow, partly due to implementation challenges, such as the tradeoff...