In many consumer‐intensive (B2C) services, delivering memorable customer experiences is often a source of competitive advantage. And yet, there exist few formal guidelines to design the structure of such experiences. In this chapter, we introduce a utility‐based model of customer...

Despite their idiosyncrasies, motor and cognitive learning and endurance sports training have in common that they involve repeated practice. While considerable research has been devoted to the effect of practice on performance, little is known about optimal practice strategies. In this paper, we...

As the nature of work has become more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive, and rapidly changing, people—be they workers or customers—have become more central to operational processes and have impacted operational outcomes in novel and perhaps more fundamental ways. Research in...

In competitive industries, some firms bundle their products, whereas others unbundle them; still other firms occupy a niche position and offer only a subset of products. No general theory has been advanced to explain this variety of bundling strategies. We characterize the strategies of two...

In a multi-server, single-queue symmetric capacity choice game, Gopalakrishnan et al. (2016) characterize the existence of a Nash equilibrium under a requirement on the servers’ capacity cost functions, which excludes some highly relevant cases where servers have ample discretion over their...

For many information goods, longer publication cycles are more economical, but often result in less timely - and, therefore, less valuable - information. While the digitalization of publication processes reduced fixed publication costs, making shorter publication cycles (or batches of...

Contrary to traditional queueing theory, recent field studies in health care and call centers indicate that pooling queues may not lead to operational efficiencies relative to dedicated queues. We use a series of three experiments to examine the conditions under which this may be the case and to...

Problem Definition: Large buyers of agricultural commodities (e.g., cocoa, coffee, hazelnuts) have spearheadedprograms to improve smallholder farmers’ yields. However, some farmers, especially those not enrolled in such programs, are concerned that yield improvements could result in a decrease...

Workers in knowledge-intensive industries often complain of having too many meetings, but organizations still give little thought to deciding when or how often to meet. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency and robustness of various coordination scheduling rules. We consider a situation...

Teamwork is central to many organizations, especially in knowledge-intensive and service industries. Yet, the reality of many teams is that not everyone contributes equally. Often one person single-handedly carries out a project's execution because it is more efficient or, alternatively, due to...