In a service organization, a number of mechanisms may be used to match a limited supply of services with an unpredictable demand for those services. Tactical and operational mechanisms, which actually enhance the organization's performance, may either increase absolute capacity and efficiency,...

In this article Gabriel Bitran and Susana Mondschein discuss the most important features of the mailing process in the catalog sales industry. They contrast a 'conventional' approach for mailing and inventory decisions, that is recommended in the specialized literature and has been observed in...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the optimal contact policies for customers that belong to the mass affluent market. Design/methodology/approach The authors formulate a stochastic dynamic programming model to determine the optimal frequency of contacts in order to maximize the...

The service encounter plays a critical role in determining customer satisfaction. It is the service firm's 'moment of truth'. Surveying and building upon the existing literature, Gabriel Bitran and Maureen Lojo develop a framework for evaluating and improving the quality of the customer...

In this paper we review the literature on product development from a services perspective. We identify similarities in the creation and evolution of products and services, and discuss three types of knowledge that are commonly required in a development process: the sequence of steps or...

In this paper, we examine the research and results of dynamic pricing policies and their relation to revenue management. The survey is based on a generic revenue management problem in which a perishable and nonrenewable set of resources satisfy stochastic price sensitive demand processes over a...