The sports club, described in this study, was losing members and in dire financial straits. It became obvious from the optimistic forecasts and fragmented historical records that the membership system was poorly understood by the club's decision making groups and committees. A corporate system...

An important task in the analysis of a behavioral simulation model is to explain clearly how the model's organizational assumptions lead to its simulated behavior. All too often, model-based arguments involve an uncomfortable "leap of logic" between equations and consequences. This paper...

Managing highly skilled employees is extremely complex because of the need to balance the costs and time lags associated with their training against the need to meet demand as quickly as possible. Unlike previous approaches to this problem in the staffing literature, this paper develops an...

Public health budget constraints force policy makers to prioritize resources toward those interventions that yield the highest perceived benefits. Intuitively, it appears optimal to focus resources on affordable interventions against prevalent diseases. However, due to the dynamics of infectious...

Recent evidence suggests the connection between quality improvement and financial results may be weak. Consider the case of Analog Devices, Inc., a leading manufacturer of integrated circuits. Analog's TQM program was a dramatic success. Yield doubled, cycle time was cut in half, and product...

The erosion of service quality throughout the economy is a frequent concern in the popular press. The American Customer Satisfaction Index for services fell in 2000 to 69.4%, down 5 percentage points from 1994. We hypothesize that the characteristics of services---inseparability, intangibility,...

In collaboration with industry partners, a normative model of the product concept decision process was developed, supported with tools and techniques, and codified as a decision support process for product development teams. This process (Concept Engineering) was then introduced into a number of...

The decision rules in simulation models of human behavior purport to describe decision-making behavior as it is and not as it should optimally be. Without the criterion of optimality to judge the appropriateness of a decision rule, simulation modelers must rely on empirical confirmation of the...

Studies in the psychology of individual choice have identified numerous cognitive and other bounds on human rationality, often producing systematic errors and biases. Yet for the most part models of aggregate phenomena in management science and economics are not consistent with such...

Boom and bust is a pervasive dynamic for new products. Word of mouth, marketing, and learning curve effects can fuel rapid growth, often leading to overcapacity, price war, and bankruptcy. Previous experiments suggest such dysfunctional behavior can be caused by systematic "misperceptions of...