Each year the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society of INFORMS conducts a student paper competition. In Volume 2, Issue 2 of M&SOM, we published the extended abstracts of the 1999 winners in the hopes that this could become an annual event. Our hopes have become a...

The case is about a new type of contact center – the virtual contact center – that employs a geographically dispersed workforce in the cloud. Founded in 2000, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, LiveOps’ ‘home-shore’ business model combines a dual innovation: (1) it allows agents to work when...