Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider queuing systems where captive repeat customers select a service facility each period. Are people in such a distributed system, with limited information diffusion, able to approach optimal system performance? How are queues formed? How do...

Discusses the changes in European banking since the introduction of the euro, providing statistics on mergers and acquisitions (mostly domestic) and their effects on assets both inside and outside the eurozone. Considers the factors which make cross‐border mergers less attractive, the effect...

A new e‐business model for implementing complex business transactions via the Internet has been created. The model involves search, negotiation, and legal closing, and its implementation, as described here, is able to: quantitatively evaluate preferences of potential customers (tenants and...

Provides an overview of mechanical and electrical services as they apply to modern museums, and the means of controlling and monitoring the systems in use. Discusses air‐conditioning, lighting, fire detection and alarms, monitoring, building energy management systems, estate management, and...

This paper discusses the role that customers play as human resources in service‐based organizations. These involve situations where a customer replaces a more traditional employee (ATMs, self‐serve gas stations), or situations where the customer serves as a strategic partner by providing...

This exploratory study investigates the nature of customer evaluations of their service encounters in a retail chain departmental store setting in Victoria, Australia. The focus of the study is to understand how a customer perceives positive and negative encounters with regard to shopping at the...

The only therapy for a patient with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) is liver transplantation, which is performed by using either a cadaveric liver from a deceased donor or a portion of a living-donor's liver. This study addresses the following decision problem for an ESLD patient with an...

This paper examines the link between a supplier's marketing and service operations and its business customers' subsequent repatronage behavior. We develop a dynamic model of service contract renewal for an individual firm, at the contract level, recognizing interdependencies among service...

Much of prior work in the area of service operations management has assumed service rates to be exogenous to the level of load on the system. Using operational data from patient transport services and cardiothoracic surgery--two vastly different health-care delivery services--we show that the...

The labor scheduling literature has demonstrated that the use of flexibility in designing employee schedules can result in a substantial improvement in labor utilization. This paper presents a new implicit integer linear programming formulation for the inclusion of meal/rest-break flexibility....