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...

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...

We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacities to meet random, non-stationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model that explicitly represents...

We study an M/MMPP/1 queuing system, where the arrival process is Poisson and service requirements are Markov modulated. When the Markov Chain modulating service times has two states, we show that the distribution of the number-in-system is a superposition of two matrix-geometric series and...

We analyze a model of consumer response to variation in product or service quality. The model, developed in [4], provides closed-form expressions that characterize short-term and long-term measures of customer loyalty to a supplier. In this paper, we develop sensitivity analyses that offer a...

A call center is a service network in which agents provide telephone-based services. Customers that seek these services are delayed in tele-queues.<p> <p>This paper summarizes an analysis of a unique record of call center operations. The data comprise a complete operational history of a small banking...</p></p>

A consumer has repeated contacts with a set of product or service providers. Each visit to a supplier yields the consumer some randomly distributed utility. The suppliers' utility distributions are unknown to the consumer, and to decide which supplier to visit, she uses a myopic variant of the...

To mitigate the threat that terrorists smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States through maritime containers, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspects containers upon entry to domestic ports. Inspection-driven congestion is costly, and CBP provides...

A U.S. law mandating nonintrusive imaging and radiation detection for 100% of U.S.-bound containers at international ports has provoked widespread concern that the resulting congestion would hinder trade significantly. Using detailed data on container movements, gathered from two large...