Organizations engage in search whenever they perform nonroutine tasks, such as the definition and validation of a new strategy, the acquisition of new capabilities, or new product development. Previous work on search and organizational hierarchy has discovered that a hierarchy with a central...

Consider a data communication network owned and operated by a single organization. The network has an infinite number of small users and is managed by a system manager (SM) whose objective is to maximize the net value of the system as a whole. The objective of this paper is to study pricing...

We develop a structural model of credit risk in a network economy, where any firm can lend to any other firm, so that each firm is subject to counterparty risk either from direct borrowers or from remote firms in the network. This model takes into account the role of each firm's cash management....

We propose a general hierarchical procedure to address real-life job shop scheduling problems. The shop typically produces a variety of products, each with its own arrival stream, its own route through the shop and a given customer due date. The procedure first determines the manufacturing lot...

An important design problem for queueing systems is to determine the best order for two or more service stations in series. For given external arrival process and given service-time distributions, the object is to determine the order of the stations (to be used by all customers) that minimizes...

For given external arrival process and given service-time distributions, the object is to determine the order of infinite-capacity single-server queues in series that minimizes the long-run average sojourn time per customer. We gain additional insight into this queueing design problem, and...

In this paper, we propose a fast adaptive importance sampling method for the efficient simulation of buffer overflow probabilities in queueing networks. The method comprises three stages. First, we estimate the minimum cross-entropy tilting parameter for a small buffer level; next, we use this...

One of the most important operational challenges faced by emergency departments (EDs) in the United States is patient overcrowding. In periods of overcrowding, an ED can request the emergency medical services (EMS) agency to divert incoming ambulances to neighboring hospitals, a phenomenon known...