Provision of real-time information by a firm to its customers has become prevalent in recent years in both the service and retail sectors. In this paper, we study a retail operations model where customers are strategic in both their actions and in the way they interpret information, while the...

Firms have more information than their customers about the availability of the product. Given the increase in the strategic nature of customers, who consider both prices with future availability risk in making their purchase decisions, the firm may be interested in communicating this information...

Large-scale, web-based service marketplaces have recently emerged as a new resource for customers who need quick resolutions for their short-term problems. Due to the temporary nature of the relations between customers and service providers (agents) in these marketplaces, customers may not have...

We explore whether customers are loss averse in time and how delay information may impact such reference-dependent behavior using observational and field-experiment data from two call centers of an Israeli bank. We consider settings with no announcements and announcements of different accuracy...

In this paper, we explore the impact of delay announcements using an empirical approach by analyzing the data from a medium-sized call center. We first explore the question of whether delay announcements impact customers' behavior using a nonparametric approach. The answer to this question...

We study how to use delay announcements to manage customer expectations while allowing the firm to prioritize among customers with different sensitivities to time and value. We examine this problem by developing a framework which characterizes the strategic interaction between the firm and...