Firms increasingly use contingent labor to flexibly respond to demand in many environments. Labor supply agencies are growing to fill this need. As a result, firms and agencies are engaging in long-term contracts for labor supply. We develop mathematical models of the interaction between firms...

We study how differences in product demand characteristics affect the strategic value of different types of supply chain flexibility for accurate response. We propose a single-period inventory modelling framework with two ordering opportunities. The second order reflects updated demand...

Acall center with both contract and noncontract customers was giving priority to the contract customers only in off-peak hours, precisely when having priority was least important. In this paper, we investigate whether this is rational behavior on the part of the call center and what the...

This paper studies outsourcing decisions for a two-level service process in which the first level serves as a gatekeeper for a second level of experts. The objective of the system operator (the client) is to minimize the sum of staffing costs, customer waiting costs, and mistreatment costs due...

Two important defensive mechanisms available to governments combating terrorism are warnings and the deployment of physical resources. Warnings are relatively inexpensive to issue but their effectiveness suffers from false alarms. Physical deployments of trained security personnel can directly...

The Internet's computational power and flexibility have made auctions a widespread and integral part of both consumer and business markets. Though online auctions are a multi-billion dollar annual activity, with a growing variety of sophisticated trading mechanisms, scientific research on them...

This paper examines services in which customers encounter a gatekeeper who makes an initial diagnosis of the customer's problem and then may refer the customer to a specialist. The gatekeeper may also attempt to solve the problem, but the probability of treatment success decreases as the...

In this paper, we examine contracts to coordinate the capacity decision of a vendor who has been hired by a client to provide call center support. We consider a variety of contracts, all based on our observations of contracts used by one large vendor. We examine the role of different contract...