In a scheduling problem where agents can opt out, we show that the familiar Random Priority (RP)a rule can be improved upon by another mechanism dubbed Probabilistic Serial (PS). Both mechanisms are nonmanipulable in a strong sense, but the latter is Pareto superior to the former and serves a...

The immediate motivation of this paper is California Bill AB 394, legislation which mandates fixed nurse-to-patient staffing ratios as a means to address the current crisis in the quality of health care delivery. Modeling medical units as closed queueing systems, we seek to determine whether or...

Waiting tolerance at ramp meters and travel time on the freewaywere measured using a computer administered stated preference (CASP) survey and a virtual experience stated preference (VESP) methodemploying a driving simulator.The selections varied in the number of minutes waiting at a ramp meter...

Researchers have raised two concerns about the current patent approval process by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). First, it takes too long to process applications. Second, examiners make too many errors in the approval process. The first concern suggests that examiners...

Today's data centres offer many different IT services mostly hosted on dedicated physical servers. Virtualization provides a technical means for server consolidation leading to increased server utilization. The term refers to the abstraction of computing resources across many aspects of...

In recent years, growth in the demand for emergency medical services along with decline in the number of hospitals with emergency departments (EDs) has led to overcrowding. In periods of overcrowding, an ED can request the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) agency to divert incoming ambulances to...

In a recent article which appeared in this journal, Hoel and Saeter propose a model showing that welfare may be improved by introducing delay in public health care. In this note we argue that their model may be used as starting point because of their stringent assumptions. We suggest that the...

Kriging (Gaussian process, spatial correlation) metamodels approximate the Input/Output (I/O) functions implied by the underlying simulation models; such metamodels serve sensitivity analysis and optimization, especially for computationally expensive simulations. In practice, simulation analysts...

Queuing mechanisms are commonly used in developing countries and in transition economies to allocate goods characterized by excess demand to citizens. Bribery and favoritism frequently accompany the use of such queuing mechanisms. Therefore, we first analyze a queuing model of resource...

The paper examines prioritization in a queuing system and analyzes whether, in the presence of heterogeneous customers and a costly sorting process, it pays to prioritize. In particular, in our model, the task of gathering information to prioritize/sort jobs consumes resources. We investigate a...