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作者：Soh, Seung Bum; Gurvich, Itai
作者单位：Sejong University
摘要：Call centers attribute different values to different customer segments. These values are reflected in quality-of-service targets. The prevalent target service factor (TSF) formulation requires, for example, that 80% of VIP customers wait less than 20 seconds while setting the target to 30 seconds for non-VIP customers. The call center must determine the staffing level together with a prioritization rule that meets these targets at minimal cost. In practice, because of the underlying complexity...
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作者：Ni, Eric C.; Ciocan, Dragos F.; Henderson, Shane G.; Hunter, Susan R.
作者单位：Cornell University; INSEAD Business School; Purdue University System; Purdue University
摘要：The goal of ranking and selection (R&S) procedures is to identify the best stochastic system from among a finite set of competing alternatives. Such procedures require constructing estimates of each system's performance, which can be obtained simultaneously by running multiple independent replications on a parallel computing platform. Nontrivial statistical and implementation issues arise when designing R&S procedures for a parallel computing environment. We propose several design principles f...
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作者：Caldentey, Rene; Liu, Ying; Lobel, Ilan
作者单位：University of Chicago; New York University
摘要：We consider the pricing problem faced by a monopolist who sells a product to a population of consumers over a finite time horizon. Customers' types differ along two dimensions: (i) their willingness-to-pay for the product and (ii) their arrival time during the selling season. We assume that the seller knows only the support of the customers' valuations and do not make any other distributional assumptions about customers' willingness-to-pay or arrival times. We consider a robust formulation of ...
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作者：Mookerjee, Radha; Kumar, Subodha; Mookerjee, Vijay S.
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas; Texas A&M University System; Texas A&M University College Station; Mays Business School
摘要：This study provides an approach to manage an ongoing Internet ad campaign that substantially improves the number of clicks and the revenue earned from clicks. The problem we study is faced by an Internet advertising firm (Chitika) that operates in the Boston area. Chitika contracts with publishers to place relevant advertisements (ads) over a specified period on publisher websites. Ad revenue accrues to the firm and the publisher only if a visitor clicks on an ad (i.e., we are considering the ...
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作者：Lam, Henry; Mottet, Clementine
作者单位：Columbia University; Boston University
摘要：A common bottleneck in evaluating extremal performance measures is that, because of their very nature, tail data are often very limited. The conventional approach selects the best probability distribution from tail data using parametric fitting, but the validity of the parametric choice can be difficult to verify. This paper describes an alternative based on the computation of worst-case bounds under the geometric premise of tail convexity, a feature shared by all common parametric tail distri...
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作者：Bansal, Saurabh; Gutierrez, Genaro J.; Keiser, John R.
作者单位：Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; Dow Chemical Company
摘要：Motivated by a unique agribusiness setting, this paper develops an optimization-based approach to estimate the mean and standard deviation of probability distributions from noisy quantile judgments provided by experts. The approach estimates the mean and standard deviations as weighted linear combinations of quantile judgments, where the weights are explicit functions of the expert's judgmental errors. The approach is analytically tractable, and provides flexibility to elicit any set of quanti...
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作者：Chan, Carri W.; Dong, Jing; Green, Linda V.
作者单位：Columbia University; Northwestern University
摘要：In order for a patient to be discharged from a hospital unit, a physician must first perform a physical examination and review the pertinent medical information to determine that the patient is stable enough to be transferred to a lower level of care or be discharged home. Requiring an inspection of a patient's readiness for discharge introduces an interesting dynamic where patients may occupy a bed longer than medically necessary. Motivated by this phenomenon, we introduce a queueing system w...
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作者：Aksin, Zeynep; Ata, Baris; Emadi, Seyed Morteza; Su, Che-Lin
作者单位：Koc University; University of Chicago; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
摘要：We undertake an empirical study of the impact of delay announcements on callers' abandonment behavior and the performance of a call center with two priority classes. A Cox regression analysis reveals that in this call center, callers' abandonment behavior is affected by the announcement messages heard. To account for this, we formulate a structural estimation model of callers' (endogenous) abandonment decisions. In this model, callers are forward-looking utility maximizers and make their aband...
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作者：Cheung, Wang Chi; Simchi-Levi, David; Wang, He
作者单位：Agency for Science Technology & Research (A*STAR); A*STAR - Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology
摘要：In a dynamic pricing problem where the demand function is not known a priori, price experimentation can be used as a demand learning tool. Existing literature usually assumes no constraint on price changes, but in practice, sellers often face business constraints that prevent them from conducting extensive experimentation. We consider a dynamic pricing model where the demand function is unknown but belongs to a known finite set. The seller is allowed to make at most m price changes during T pe...
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作者：Fischetti, Matteo; Ljubic, Ivana; Monaci, Michele; Sinnl, Markus
作者单位：University of Padua; ESSEC Business School; University of Bologna; University of Vienna
摘要：Bilevel optimization problems are very challenging optimization models arising in many important practical contexts, including pricing mechanisms in the energy sector, airline and telecommunication industry, transportation networks, critical infrastructure defense, and machine learning. In this paper, we consider bilevel programs with continuous and discrete variables at both levels, with linear objectives and constraints (continuous upper level variables, if any, must not appear in the lower ...
