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...

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...

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...