Operations Research

Preface to the Special Issue on Behavioral Queueing Science: The Need for a Multidisciplinary Approach

Modern service systems are economically important but operationally complex. In “Preface to the Special Issue on Behavioral Queueing Science: The Need ...

History: This paper has been accepted for the Operations Research Special Issue on Behavioral Queueing Science.

When boarding an aircraft, it is often assumed that minimizing the total boarding time meets economic objectives and passenger satisfaction. However, there are indications that not only the total boarding time should be considered in order to satisfy ...

Managerial optimization challenges in service industries often entail the need to ensure customer satisfaction. For example, in airplane boarding, the boarding time should be minimized, but to ensure customer satisfaction, the process must not be too ...

In “Who Is Next: Patient Prioritization Under Emergency Department Blocking,” Li, Sun, and Hong study how physicians and nurses choose the next patient for treatment in hospital emergency departments (EDs). Using data from a tertiary hospital in Alberta, ...

Upon arrival at emergency departments (EDs), patients are classified into different triage levels indicating their urgency. Using data from a large hospital in Canada, we find that, within the same triage level, the average waiting time (time from triage ...

When Should I Transfer This Customer?

“Please hold while I transfer you to next level of support.” Most of us have been on the receiving end of this message. In this study, the authors look at transfers from the service worker’s perspective. They create an ...

In many service encounters, frontline workers (often referred to as gatekeepers) have the discretion to attempt to resolve a customer request or to transfer the customer to an expert service provider. Motivated by an incentive redesign at a call center of ...

To Pool or Not to Pool? Analyzing Customer-Intensive Services with Strategic Agents

In customer-intensive services where service quality increases with service time, service providers commonly pool their agents and give performance bonuses that reward ...

In customer-intensive services where service quality increases with service time, service providers commonly pool their agents and give performance bonuses that reward agents for achieving greater customer satisfaction and serving more customers. ...

Online retail has become more prominent around the world in the last decade. As a result, online retailers' website performance is increasingly important. Previous literature has extensively studied customer sensitivity to service speed and wait times in ...

The impact of delays has been widely studied in various offline services. The focus of this study is online services, and we explore the impact of in-process delays—measured by website speed—on customer behavior. We leverage novel retail and website speed ...

Diagnostic processes are difficult to manage because they require the decision maker (DM) to dynamically balance the benefit of acquiring more diagnostic information against the cost of doing so. When additional and unattended diagnostic tasks build up ...

To study the effect of congestion on the fundamental tradeoff between diagnostic accuracy and speed, we empirically test the predictions of a formal sequential testing model in a setting where the gathering of additional information can improve diagnostic ...

Shall Follow-up Appointments Be Booked in Advance?

Appointment systems are ubiquitous, especially in healthcare. By looking into a large data set with over 1.6 million appointments, we observe that many doctors booked a follow-up appointment at the end of ...

We study an appointment-based slotted-service queue with the goal of maximizing service volume. Returning customers prefer to be served by the same service agent as in their previous visit. This model captures aspects of a whole host of settings, ...

Trade-offs Caused by Batching Inpatient Admissions from Emergency Departments

In “To Batch or Not to Batch? Impact of Admission Batching on Emergency Department Boarding Time and Physician Productivity,” Feizi and coauthors tackle the important problem of ...

We study the behavior of batching by discretionary workers in the first stage of a two-stage queuing system and explore the trade-off it causes between their productivity and second stage wait times. Specifically, we focus on the behavior of batching ...

Patient demand for emergency medical services has never been greater. In the United States, as fewer people access medical care through a primary care provider, more people access care through the hospital emergency department (ED). Unlike other types of ...

Patient demand for emergency medical services continues to rise from all-time highs. Physicians generally respond to the rising demand by increasing the level of multitasking. What leads emergency department (ED) physicians to select which patients, and ...

The gig economy open a new business model in which services have access to a large pool of workers that are compensated based on their actual production, which can be useful to operate at lower levels of utilization to improve response times to customers. ...

In many service industries, the speed of service and support by experienced employees are two major drivers of service quality. When demand for a service is variable and the staffing requirements cannot be adjusted quickly, choosing capacity levels ...

Healthcare providers have long grappled with patients not showing up for their scheduled medical appointments; such no-shows lead to wasted resources and longer wait times for other patients. However, new operations research offers a promising solution to ...

Patient no-shows for scheduled medical appointments are of great concern for many healthcare providers. In this paper, we tackle the no-show problem by applying insights from behavioral science. Specifically, we “nudge” patients into arriving for their ...