Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in a short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious: more discounted...

The marketing and operations management arms in a firm must work in coordination: marketing efforts to create demand go to waste if supply is suboptimal, and vice versa. However, achieving this coordination has remained a long-standing problem, because in most firms these units are managed in a...

We develop a model to understand and predict customers’ observed multichannel behavior in a customer support setting. Using individual-level data from a US-based health insurance firm, we model a customer's query frequency and choice of using the telephone or web channel for resolving queries...

We study a single queue joining equilibrium when there is uncertainty in the consumers' minds about the service rate and value. Without such uncertainty, the joining equilibria are characterized by means of a single threshold queue length above which consumers do not join (Naor, 1969). We show...

Problem Definition: Customers arriving at a service provider are faced with a queue. On joining the queue, they get to observe the service speed while waiting in the queue. They renege if the updated wait times are too long. When and how should a revenue-maximizing service provider share service...