The immediate motivation of this paper is California Bill AB 394, legislation which mandates fixed nurse-to-patient staffing ratios as a means to address the current crisis in the quality of health care delivery. Modeling medical units as closed queueing systems, we seek to determine whether or...

Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities for the purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption vs. investment tradeoff, where investment corresponds to providing capacity for revenue customers, and...

We consider a capacitated supply system that produces a single item that is demanded by several classes of customers. Each customer class may have a different backorder cost, so stock allocation arises as a key decision problem. We model the supply system as a multi customer make-to-stock queue....

We consider the problem of allocating demand arising from multiple products to multiple production facilities with finite capacity and load-dependent lead times. Production facilities can choose to manufacture items either to stock or to order. Products vary in their demand rates, holding and...

This paper considers a call center outsourcing contract analysis and choice problem faced by a contractor and a service provider. The service provider receives an uncertain call volume over multiple periods and is considering outsourcing all or part of these calls to a contractor. Each call...

We consider a manufacturing facility that produces a single item that is demanded by several different classes of customers. The inventory-related cost performance of such a system can be improved by effective allocation of production and inventories. We obtain the optimal parameters for three...

We consider a make-to-stock supplier that operates a production facility with limited capacity. The supplier receives orders from customers belonging to several demand classes. Some of the customer classes share advance demand information with the supplier by announcing their orders ahead of...

This paper studies the productivity impact of a contract change for tea pluckers in an Indian plantation. The contract, implemented at the end of a three-year cycle in which contracts are generally revised, was (a) the joint outcome of negotiations between twenty unions and plantations, (b)...

Equipment manufacturers offer different types of maintenance service plans (MSPs) that delineate payment structures between equipment operators and maintenance service providers. These MSPs allocate risks differently and thus induce different kinds of incentives. A fundamental question,...

In diagnostic services, agents typically need to weigh the benefit of running an additional test and improving the accuracy of diagnosis against the cost of delaying the provision of services to others. Our paper analyzes how to dynamically manage this accuracy/congestion trade-off. To that end,...