Contrary to traditional queueing theory, recent field studies in health care and call centers indicate that pooling queues may not lead to operational efficiencies relative to dedicated queues. We use a series of three experiments to examine the conditions under which this may be the case and to...

Problem Definition: Large buyers of agricultural commodities (e.g., cocoa, coffee, hazelnuts) have spearheadedprograms to improve smallholder farmers’ yields. However, some farmers, especially those not enrolled in such programs, are concerned that yield improvements could result in a decrease...

Workers in knowledge-intensive industries often complain of having too many meetings, but organizations still give little thought to deciding when or how often to meet. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency and robustness of various coordination scheduling rules. We consider a situation...

Teamwork is central to many organizations, especially in knowledge-intensive and service industries. Yet, the reality of many teams is that not everyone contributes equally. Often one person single-handedly carries out a project's execution because it is more efficient or, alternatively, due to...

In this paper, we analyze the contracting issues that arise in collaborative services, such as consulting, financial planning, and IT outsourcing. In particular, we investigate how the choice of contract type, among fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and performance-based contracts, is driven by the...

In some strategic alliances, a firm shares its manufacturing capacity with another, and the latter shares its distribution capacity with the former. Even though such bidirectional alliances have become common, they remain challenging to manage due to the frequent disputes over capacity...