Many service providers offer customers the choice of either waiting in a line or going offline and returning at a dynamically determined future time. The best-known example is the FASTPASS^® system at Disneyland. To operate such a system, the service provider must make an upfront decision on how...

We consider an assemble-to-order system with a high volume of prospective customers arriving per unit time. Our objective is to maximize expected infinite horizon discounted profit by choosing product prices, component production capacities, and a dynamic policy for sequencing customer orders...

We consider an assemble-to-order system with a high volume of prospective customers arriving per unit time. A companion paper established that with optimal product prices, component production capacity, and sequencing of orders for assembly, the system can be approximated by a diffusion process...

Motivated by a $2.2 billion inventory write-off by Cisco Systems, we investigate how duplicate orders can lead a manufacturer to err in estimating the demand rate and customers' sensitivity to delay, and to make faulty decisions about capacity investment. We consider a manufacturer that sells...

We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while...

This paper employs sample path arguments to derive the following convexity properties and comparative statics for an M/M/S queue with impatient customers. If the rate at which customers balk and renege is an increasing, concave function of the number of customers in the system (head count), then...

We study large-scale service systems with multiple customer classes and many statistically identical servers. The following question is addressed: How many servers are required (staffing) and how does one match them with customers (control) to minimize staffing cost, subject to class-level...