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...

Does cross-training workers allow a firm to achieve economies of scale when there is variability in the content of work, or does it create a workforce that performs many tasks with consistent mediocrity? To address this question we integrate a model of a stochastic service system with models for...

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...

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...

We develop a method to estimate the capacity of agents who answer e-mail in a contact center, given aggregate historical data that have been distorted both by constraints on work availability and by internal incentives to slow down when true capacity exceeds demand. We use the capacity estimate...

A major problem in forecasting is estimating the time of some future event. Traditionally, forecasts are designed to minimize an error cost function that is evaluated once, possibly when the event occurs and forecast accuracy can be determined. However, in many applications forecast error costs...

A well-studied problem in the literature on airline revenue (or yield) management is the optimal allocation of seat inventory among fare classes, given a demand distribution for each class. In practice, the seat allocation decisions of one airline affect the passenger demands for seats on other...

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...

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...

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...