When facing high levels of overstock inventories, firms often push their salesforce to work harder than usual to attract more demand, and one way to achieve that is to offer attractive incentives. However, most research on the optimal design of salesforce incentives ignores this dependency and...

Public reporting of medical treatment outcomes is being widely adopted by policymakers in an effort to increase quality transparency and improve alignment between patient choices and provider capabilities. We examine the soundness of this approach by studying the effects of quality transparency...

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been widely used as invaluable tools in dynamic decision-making, which is a central concern for economic agents operating at both the micro and macro levels. Often the decision maker's information about the state is incomplete; hence, the generalization to...

This brief article discusses the important role quality transparency plays in the healthcare sector. It also describes some of the challenges faced by policymakers in improving transparency, and outlines a few solutions that they could apply

In a variety of applications, decisions needs to be made dynamically after receiving imperfect observations about the state of an underlying system. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are widely used in such applications. To use a POMDP, however, a decision-maker must have...

In various organizations including hospitals, individuals are not forced to follow specific assignments, and thus, deviations from preferred task assignments are common. This is due to the conventional wisdom that professionals should be given the flexibility to deviate from preferred...

We study how to admit and schedule heterogeneous patients by using simple, interpretable, yet effective policies when capacity is scarce, no-show behavior is patient- and time-dependent, and overtime is costly. Our work is motivated by the aforementioned operational challenges that typically...

Operations managers do not typically have full information about the demand distribution. Recognizing this, data-driven approaches have been proposed in which the manager has no information beyond the evolving history of demand observations. In practice, managers often have some partial...