Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

The amount of empirical research in operations management that has been published in this journal and in Management Science has recently witnessed a significant increase. Beyond this increase in numbers, research questions and empirical methodologies have ...

Emergency departments (EDs) typically use a triage system to classify patients into priority levels. However, most triage systems do not specify how exactly to route patients across and within the assigned triage levels. Therefore, decision makers in EDs ...

Problem description: In practice, many consumer products are produced and stocked in product lines rather than in single product variants. The issue is that manufacturers and retailers often do not agree on the product line length (i.e., the number of ...

Problem definition: Attendance at a museum fluctuates over time and is largely dependent on the exhibitions on display. Schedules can be adjusted to maximize the museum's objectives. Academic/practical relevance: In this paper, we build a model to study ...

We study the effects of rescheduling on no-show behavior in an outpatient appointment system for both new and follow-up patients. Previous literature has primarily focused on new patients and investigated the role of waiting time on no-show probability. ...

Problem definition: We study the practice-motivated problem of dynamically procuring a new, short-life-cycle product under demand uncertainty. The firm does not know the demand for the new product but has data on similar products sold in the past, ...

We study a newsvendor problem with profit risk control using value-at-risk (VaR) constraints. When a firm’s demand correlates with the price of a tradable financial asset, both financial tools (derivatives) and operational tools (inventory) can be used ...

Problem definition: Inspired by new developments in dynamic spectrum access, we study the dynamic pricing of wireless Internet access when demand and capacity (bandwidth) are stochastic. Academic/practical relevance: The demand for wireless Internet ...

Ticket queues are prevalent in service industries. They enhance customer satisfaction by eliminating physical lines but may compromise efficiency. Existing studies offer mixed results on the cause and magnitude of such inefficiency. These results, however,...

Problem definition: We analyze a new model of crowdfunding recently introduced by Bolstr, Localstake, and Startwise. A platform acts as a matchmaker between a firm needing funds and a crowd of investors willing to provide capital. After the firm is funded,...

Problem definition: Inpatient beds are usually grouped into several wards, and each ward is assigned to serve patients from certain “primary” specialties. However, when a patient waits excessively long before a primary bed becomes available, hospital ...

Problem definition: How to dynamically replenish inventory from two supply sources or shipping modes with general lead times. The fast source is more expensive than the slow source. Academic/practical relevance: Dual sourcing provides supply chain ...

We propose a hidden Markov model (HMM) approach to identifying on-shelf out-of-stock (OOS) by detecting changes in sales patterns resulting from unobserved states of the shelf. We calibrate our model using point-of-sale (POS) data from a big-box retailer. ...