In this article we take a first hand look at e-business organizational design issues from the perspective of the managers who are currently leading the e-business efforts at legacy firms. It is far too early in the history of the e-business phenomenon to declare winners and losers, and even if...

The wide spread adoption of ERP systems together with customer relationship management applications has increased the ability of a firm to share operational data with customers. In this paper we analyze the factors that determine whether or not this information sharing will benefit the firm. We...

We examine services in which customers encounter a gatekeeper who makes an initial diagnosis of the customer's problem and then may refer the customer to a specialist. The gatekeeper may also attempt to solve the problem, but the probability of treatment success decreases as the problem's...

The Internet has made auctions a common and integral part of the way commerce is conducted today. In both the consumer and business markets the applicability of auction-based trading mechanisms has been expanded by the computational power and flexibility the Internet makes available. There is...

This paper proposes and analyzes an integrated model of salesforce learning, product portfolio pricing and salesforce design. We consider a firm with a pool of sales representatives that is split into separate salesforces, one for each product. The salesforce assigned to each product is faced...

In this paper we examine contracts to coordinate the capacity decision of a vendor who has been hired by a client to provide call center support. We consider a variety of contracts, all based on our observations of contracts used by one large vendor. We examine the role of different contract...

Two important defensive mechanisms available to governments combating terrorism are warnings and the deployment of physical resources. Warnings are relatively inexpensive to issue but their effectiveness suffers from false alarms. Physical deployments of trained security personnel can directly...

Internet auctions for consumers' goods are an increasingly popular selling venue. Many sellers, instead of offering their entire inventory in a single auction, split it into sequential auctions of smaller lots, thereby reducing the negative market impact of large lots. Information technology...

Firms are increasingly using contingent labor to flexibly respond to demand in a wide array of environments and labor supply agencies are growing to fill this need. As a result, firms and agencies are engaging in long term contracts for labor supply. We develop mathematical models of the...

We construct a mathematical models to explore why digitization of employee recruiting process so far did not result in employers reporting hiring better candidates faster. We model multidimensional impact of internet technology with increases in the total number of applications, in the rate at...