In recent years, the performance-based approach to contracting for medical services has been gaining popularity across different healthcare delivery systems, both in the United States (under the name of "pay for performance") and abroad ("payment by results" in the United Kingdom). The goal of...

In diagnostic services, agents typically need to weigh the benefit of running an additional test and improving the accuracy of diagnosis against the cost of delaying the provision of services to others. Our paper analyzes how to dynamically manage this accuracy/congestion trade-off. To that end,...

We consider the processor sharing M/M/1-PS queue which also models balking. A customer that arrives and sees n others in the system “balks” (i.e., decides not to enter) with probability 1−b <Subscript> n </Subscript>. If b <Subscript> n </Subscript> is inversely proportional to n + 1, we obtain explicit expressions for a tagged...</subscript></subscript>

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural properties of the optimal batch acceptance policy in a Markovian queueing system where different classes of customers arrive in batches and the buffer capacity is finite. We prove that the optimal policy can possess certain monotonicity...

Structural properties of generalised semi-Markov processes (GSMP) have been successfully studied in the literature. Examples are the celebrated commuting condition (CC), which is the key condition for unbiasedness of the infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA) gradient estimator, or the...

Understanding the behavior of an idle time of a limited resource is the key to increase productivity in service operations. When the system consists of nonexponential properties of time distributions it becomes difficult to provide results for the general case. We derive the MacLaurin series for...

This short communication considers the workload process of a queue operating in slotted time, focusing on the (multivariate) distribution of the workloads at different points in time. In a many-sources framework exact asymptotics are determined, relying on large-deviations results for the sample...

A reduced system is a smaller system derived in the process of analyzing a larger system. In solving for steady state probabilities of a Markov chain, generally the solution can be found by first solving a reduced system of equations which is obtained by appropriately partitioning the transition...