Operations & Supply Chain Management

Hospital ambulance diversions are prevalent and increasing nationwide as emergency departments experience growing congestion. Using negative binomial regressions, this paper links the number of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) deaths to the level and extent of diversion in the five boroughs of New York City. The results indicate that both high levels of ambulance diversion and simultaneous diversion across hospitals are associated with increasing numbers of deaths from AMI.

Economics is the study of how scarce resources are allocated. Operations research studies how to accomplish goals in the least costly manner. These fields have much to offer each other in terms of challenging problems that need to be solved and the techniques to solve them. This was the case after World War II, partly because the individuals who went on to be the leading scholars in economics and operations research worked together during WWII. In fact, the two fields share many early luminaries, including Arrow, Dantzig, Holt, Kantorovich, Koopmans, Modigliani, Scarf, and von Neumann.

We study a capacity sizing problem in a service system that is modeled as a single-class queue with multiple servers and where customers may renege while waiting for service. A salient feature of the model is that the mean arrival rate of work is random (in practice this is a typical consequence of forecasting errors). The paper elucidates the impact of uncertainty on the nature of capacity prescriptions, and relates these to well established rules-of-thumb such as the square root safety staffing principle.

Discrete choice models are appealing for airline revenue management (RM) because they offer a means to profitably exploit preferences for attributes such as time of day, routing, brand, and price. They are also good at modeling demand for unrestricted fare class structures, which are widespread throughout the industry. However, there is little empirical research on the practicality and effectiveness of choice-based RM models. Toward this end, we report the results of a study of choice-based RM conducted with a major U.S. airline.

A widely used model in the online advertising industry is one where advertisers pre-purchase a reservation package of online inventory on content sites owned by publishers (e.g., CNN, amazon, etc.). Sales representatives, acting on behalf of publishers, sell inventory (impression) bundles of various types (text, video, multimedia, etc.) while trying to meet advertisers' expectations.