Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow...

Prologue: one world, diverse itineraries -- Glimpsing an urban future : divergent tracks of Gurgaon -- Inside a call center: otherworldly passages -- Neutral accent -- System identities : divergent itineraries and uses of personality -- Nightly clashes : diurnal body, nocturnal labor, neutral...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...