We consider a rental firm with two types of customers. Contract customers pay fixed, prenegotiated rental fees and expect a high quality of service. Walk-in customers have no contractual relations with the firm and are "shopping for price." Given multiple contract and walk-in classes, the rental...

Recent operations management papers model customers as solving multiarmed bandit problems, positing that consumers use a particular heuristic when choosing among suppliers. These papers then analyze the resulting competition among suppliers and mathematically characterize the equilibrium...

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments...

The observed behavior of customers and managers often does not fit the assumptions of theoretical models used in the operations management (OM) literature. New research in behavioral OM is emerging to bridge the gap between traditional models and these newer observational findings. This work is...

Companies may choose to outsource parts, but not all, of their call-center operations. In some cases, they classify customers as high or low value, serving the former with their in-house operations and routing the latter to an outsourcer. Typically, they impose service-level constraints on the...

To mitigate the threat that terrorists smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States through maritime containers, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspects containers upon entry to domestic ports. Inspection-driven congestion is costly, and CBP provides...

A U.S. law mandating nonintrusive imaging and radiation detection for 100% of U.S.-bound containers at international ports has provoked widespread concern that the resulting congestion would hinder trade significantly. Using detailed data on container movements, gathered from two large...