We consider project scheduling where the project manager’s objective is to minimize the time from when an adversary discovers the project until the completion of the project. We analyze the complexity of the problem identifying both polynomially solvable and NP-hard versions of the problem....

This paper examines the staffing, division of labor, and resulting profitability of primary care physician practices. Division of labor is viewed as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of production processes through specialization. At the same time, division of labor also introduces...

Many firms in the business-to-consumer market sell identical products online using auctions and posted prices at the same time. In this paper, we develop and analyze a model of the key trade-offs sellers face in such a dual-channel setting built around the optimal choice of three design...

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...

Internet auctions for consumers' goods are an increasingly popular selling venue. We have observed that many sellers, instead of offering their entire inventory in a single auction, split it into sequential auctions of smaller lots, thereby reducing the negative market impact of larger lots....

We define a high volume factory to be a connected network of workstations, at which assigned workers process work-in-progress that flows at high rates through the workstations. A high rate usually implies that each worker processes many pieces per hour, enough so that work can be described as a...

This paper contributes to the supply chain contracts literature in economics and operations by performing qualitative sensitivity analysis of a wholesale price contract in a two-echelon supply chain setting. Order-theory tools are used to derive sufficient conditions for monotonicity of contract...

We consider a retailer with one radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled supplier and one non-RFID enabled supplier. Assuming vendor managed inventory, we address the problem of allocation and pricing of the retail shelf-space. Using a Stackelberg game where the retailer leads, we observe...

Although uncertainty is rife in many project management contexts, little is known about adaptively optimizing project schedules. We formulate the problem of adaptively optimizing the expected present value of a project's cash flow, and we show that it is practical to perform the optimization....

We consider a retailer with one radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled supplier and one non-RFID enabled supplier. Assuming vendor managed inventory, we address the problem of allocation and pricing of the retail shelf-space. Using a Stackelberg game where the retailer leads, we observe...