The public debate in Europe is turning against business because outsourcing and off-shoring are perceived to destroy jobs, and corporate profitability is seen as inconsistent with a wage stagnation of salaried employees. Managers in Europe feel surrounded by hostile regulation, protected product...

Sequential sampling problems arise in stochastic simulation and many other applications. Sampling is used to infer the unknown performance of several alternatives before one alternative is selected as best. This paper presents new economically motivated fully sequential sampling procedures to...

Models for the economic evaluation of health technologies provide valuable information to decision makers. The choice of model structure is rarely discussed in published studies and can affect the results produced. Many papers describe good modelling practice, but few describe how to choose from...

Ranking and selection procedures are standard methods for selecting the best of a finite number of simulated design alternatives based on a desired level of statistical evidence for correct selection. But the link between statistical significance and financial significance is indirect, and there...

Selection procedures are used in a variety of applications to select the best of a finite set of alternatives. "Best" is defined with respect to the largest mean, but the mean is inferred with statistical sampling, as in simulation optimization. There are a wide variety of procedures, which begs...

One charge of the United States Environmental Protection Agency is to study the risk of infection for microbial agents that can be disseminated through drinking water systems, and to recommend water treatment policy to counter that risk. Recently proposed dynamical system models quantify...

Although simulation is widely used to select the best of several alternative system designs, and common random numbers is an important tool for reducing the computation effort of simulation experiments, there are surprisingly few tools available to help a simulation practitioner select the best...

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 develop a method to estimate the capacity of agents who answer e-mail in a contact center, given aggregate historical data that have been distorted both by constraints on work availability and by internal incentives to slow down when true capacity exceeds demand. We use the capacity estimate...