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作者：Cezik, Mehmet Tolga; L'Ecuyer, Pierre
作者单位：Universite de Montreal; Universite de Montreal
摘要：We study an iterative cutting-plane algorithm on an integer program for minimizing the staffing costs of a multiskill call center subject to service-level requirements that are estimated by simulation. We solve a sample average version of the problem, where the service levels are expressed as functions of the staffing for a fixed sequence of random numbers driving the simulation. An optimal solution of this sample problem is also an optimal solution to the original problem when the sample size...
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作者：Aksin, O. Zeynep; de Vericourt, Francis; Karaesmen, Fikri
作者单位：Koc University; Duke University; Koc University
摘要：This paper considers a call center outsourcing contract analysis and choice problem faced by a contractor and a service provider. The service provider receives an uncertain call volume over multiple periods and is considering outsourcing all or part of these calls to a contractor. Each call brings in a fixed revenue to the service provider. Answering calls requires having service capacity; thus implicit in the outsourcing decision is a capacity decision. Insufficient capacity implies that call...
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作者：Bhandari, Atul; Scheller-Wolf, Alan; Harchol-Balter, Mor
作者单位：Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh; Carnegie Mellon University; Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：Call center managers are facing increasing pressure to reduce costs while maintaining acceptable service quality Consequently, they often face constrained stochastic optimization problems, minimizing cost subject to service-level constraints. Complicating this problem is the fact that customer-arrival rates to call centers are often time varying. Thus, to satisfy their service goals in a cost-effective manner, call centers may employ permanent operators who always provide service, and temporar...
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作者：Salomon, Robert; Martin, Xavier
作者单位：New York University; Tilburg University; Tilburg University
摘要：Organizational growth and performance hinge upon the effective deployment of productive knowledge in new facilities. However, getting those facilities fully operational can be difficult and time consuming. Interestingly, we understand little about what determines the performance of that process. In this paper we help fill this gap by analyzing multiple determinants of time-to-build - i.e., the time it takes a firm to build and ramp up operations at a new manufacturing facility. Theoretically, ...
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作者：Feldman, Zohar; Mandelbaum, Avishai; Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward
作者单位：Technion Israel Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Columbia University
摘要：This paper develops methods to determine appropriate staffing levels in call centers and other many-server queueing systems with time-varying arrival rates. The goal is to achieve targeted time-stable performance, even in the presence of significant time variation in the arrival rates. The main contribution is a flexible simulation-based iterative-staffing algorithm (ISA) for the M-t/G/s(t) + G model-with nonhomogeneous Poisson arrival process (the M,) and customer abandonment (the +G). For Ma...
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作者：Dawande, Milind; Kumar, Subodha; Mookerjee, Vijay; Sriskandarajah, Chelliah
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas; University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
摘要：Recently, an agile software development technique called extreme programming has caught the attention of practitioners and researchers in the software industry. A core practice of extreme programming is pair programming, where two developers work on the same piece of code. We introduce the problem of assigning pairs of developers to modules so as to maximize the commonality -a measure of the extent to which common developers work on related modules -subject to a load-balancing constraint that ...
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作者：Ghemawat, Pankaj; Thomas, Catherine
作者单位：University of Navarra; IESE Business School; Columbia University
摘要：Agglomeration in foreign direct investment (FDI) is typically attributed to location-specific characteristics such as natural resource advantages or production-related spillovers between multinational firms. The increasing collocation of the largest global firms in the cement industry since the 1980s is not easily attributed to either of these explanations. This paper draws on theories of multimarket contact to test whether strategic interaction across national markets has influenced the succe...
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作者：Novak, Sharon; Stern, Scott
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Northwestern University
摘要：This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development life cycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different dimensions of product performance. Outsourcing facilitates access to cutting-edge technology and the use of high-powered performance contracts. Vertical integration allows firms to adapt to unforeseen contingencies and cus...
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作者：Naseraldin, Hussein; Herer, Yale T.
作者单位：University of Toronto; Technion Israel Institute of Technology
摘要：We research the management approach that quantitatively combines decisions that affect different planning horizons-namely, the strategic and operational ones-and simultaneously derive the optimal values of these decisions. The system we investigate comprises retail outlets and customers in an in finite-horizon setting. Both retail outlets and customers are located on a finite homogenous line segment. The total demand posed by customers is normally distributed with known mean and variance. To o...
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作者：Boatwright, Peter; Kalra, Ajay; Zhang, Wei
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：In purchase situations where attribute information is either missing or difficult to judge, a well-known heuristic that consumers use to form evaluations is the halo effect. The psychology literature has widely considered the halo a reflection of consumers' inability to discriminate between different attributes and have therefore labeled it the halo error or the logical error. The objective of this paper is to offer a rationale for the halo effect. We use a decision-theory framework to show th...
