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...

Many intensive care units (ICUs) face overcrowding. One response to this overcrowding is to bump ICU patients to other departments of the hopsital to make room for new patient arrivals. Such bumping clearly has the potential to reduce quality care. In this paper we develop a stochastic model of...

Problem definition: The premise of this paper is that labor malpractice is not solely a corporate social responsibility and human resources issue; rather, its incidence is critically driven by operational decisions. We thus develop and test hypotheses to identify key operational drivers of labor...