This paper reconstructs the long-term development of retailing, including industrial, economic and social antecedents and consequences.Among other things, it includes innovation in the form of the emergence and diffusion of successive novel types of shop (including self-service), relations...

We consider a monopolist expert offering a service with a 'credence' characteristic. A credence service is one where the customer cannot verify, even after purchase, whether the amount of prescribed service was appropriate or not; examples include legal, medical or consultancy services and car...

The usual negative effect of queue size on arrival to an M/M/c service facility is augmented, in this paper, by the negative network effect due to waiting with others, which increases as the exposure to others increases. The reward and cost structure acquires a new meaning, as the cost of...

This paper studies a pricing problem for a single-server queue where customers arrive according to a Poisson process. For each arriving customer, the service provider announces a price rate and a system wait time, and the customer decides whether to join the queue, and, if so, the duration of...

We study an inventory system with multiple supply sources and expediting options. The replenishment lead times from each supply source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We construct a family of smart ordering and expediting policies that utilize real-time supply...

We study the estimation of the probability distribution of individual patient waiting times in an emergency department (ED). Our feature-rich modelling allows for dynamic updating and refinement of waiting time estimates as patient- and ED-specific information (e.g., patient condition, ED...

This edited volume contains 16 research articles. It presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the...