Providing the right staffing levels is of paramount importance in most service centers. Excess capacity is costly, yet a lack of sufficient capacity leads to unacceptably low service levels which may be even costlier. When determining staffing levels for a service center it is, therefore,...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, 2009. "While all work in this dissertation is original, Chapters 2 and 3 are joint work with Professors Nils Rudi and Harry Groenevelt respectively, and Chapter 4 is solo work"--Acknowledgments.

Decision analysts commonly use low-order discrete approximation of probability distributions to reduce computational effort. We have found that three popular discretization methods can lead to serious errors in certain applications, among them, news vendor problem and scheduling decisions for...