Motivated by widespread outsourcing practices, this paper studies how a pre-outsourcing client facing uncertain operating costs selects an outsourcing contract between two contract types (the fixed-price contract and the cost-plus contract) proposed by two vendors, who offer contracts only if...

Ticket queues are prevalent in service industries. They enhance customer satisfaction by eliminating physical lines, but may compromise efficiency (i.e., service completion probability). Existing studies offer mixed results on the cause and magnitude of such inefficiency. These results, however,...

We developed a system for managing inventory at Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc., a major provider of aviation-information products. The system determines order quantities for charts used in flight manuals. These charts contain essential safety information that changes frequently, making standard...

Queueing systems managed by ticket technology are widely used in service industries as well as government offices. Upon arriving at a ticket queue, each customer is issued a numbered ticket. The number currently being served is displayed. An arriving customer balks if the difference between his...

We study an order promising problem in a multiclass, available-to-promise (ATP) assembly system in the presence of pseudo orders. A pseudo order refers to a tentative customer order whose attributes, such as the likelihood of an actual order, order quantity, and confirmation timing, can change...

Capacity management for new ethical drugs is one of the most challenging tasks facing pharmaceutical manufacturers due to long lead times to acquire capacity, significant risks in product launching failure, volatile and growing demand and costs, and extremely high service level requirement....