This paper studies outsourcing decisions for a two-level service process in which the first level serves as a gatekeeper for a second level of experts. The objective of the system operator (the client) is to minimize the sum of staffing costs, customer waiting costs, and mistreatment costs due...

Does cross-training workers allow a firm to achieve economies of scale when there is variability in the content of work, or does it create a workforce that performs many tasks with constant mediocrity? To address this question we integrate a model of a stochastic service system with models for...

In this paper we examine contracts to coordinate the capacity decision of a vendor who has been hired by a client to provide call center support. We consider a variety of contracts, all based on our observations of contracts used by one large vendor. We examine the role of different contract...

We examine services in which customers encounter a gatekeeper who makes an initial diagnosis of the customer's problem and then may refer the customer to a specialist. The gatekeeper may also attempt to solve the problem, but the probability of treatment success decreases as the problem's...

This paper proposes and analyzes an integrated model of salesforce learning, product portfolio pricing and salesforce design. We consider a firm with a pool of sales representatives that is split into separate salesforces, one for each product. The salesforce assigned to each product is faced...

This paper studies service systems with gatekeepers who diagnose a customer problem and then either refer the customer to an expert or attempt treatment. The probability of successful treatment by a gatekeeper decreases as the problem's complexity increases. We determine the optimal staffing...

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...