Operations & Supply Chain Management

This paper considers a Markovian model of a service system motivated by communication and information services. The system has finite processing capacity and offers multiple grades of service. The highest priority users receive a "guaranteed" processing rate, while lower priority users share residual capacity according to their priority level and therefore may experience service degradation; hence the term "best effort." This paper focuses on performance analysis for this class of systems.

Organizations worldwide use contact centers as an important channel of communication and transaction with their customers. This paper describes a contact center with two channels, one for real-time telephone service, and another for a postponed call-back service offered with a guarantee on the maximum delay until a reply is received. Customers are sensitive to both real-time and call-back delay and their behavior is captured through a probabilistic choice model. The dynamics of the system are modeled as an M/M/N multiclass system.

Motivated by practices in customer contact centers, we consider a system that offers two modes of service: real-time and postponed with a delay guarantee. Customers are informed of anticipated delays and select their preferred option of service. The resulting system is a multiclass, multiserver queueing system with state-dependent arrival rates.

We analyze an airline yield management problem on a single flight leg in which the buyers' choice of fare classes is modeled explicitly. The choice model we use is very general and includes a wide range of discrete choice models of practical interest. The optimization problem is to find, at each point in time, the optimal subset of fare classes to offer. We characterize the optimal policy for this problem exactly and show it has a surprisingly simple form.

We consider a Markovian model of a multiclass queueing system in which a single large pool of servers attends to the various customer classes. Customers waiting to be served may abandon the queue, and there is a cost penalty associated with such abandonments. Service rates, abandonment rates, and abandonment penalties are generally different for the different classes. The problem studied is that of dynamically scheduling the various classes.

We consider a joint inventory-pricing problem in which buyers act strategically and bid for units of a firm's product over an infinite horizon. The number of bidders in each period as well as the individual bidders' valuations are random but stationary over time. There is a holding cost for inventory and a unit cost for ordering more stock from an outside supplier. Backordering is not allowed. The firm must decide how to conduct its auctions and how to replenish its stock over time to maximize its profits.

This paper considers an overbooking problem with multiple reservation and inventory classes, in which the multiple inventory classes may be used as substitutes to satisfy the demand of a given reservation class (perhaps at a cost). The problem is to jointly determine overbooking levels for the reservation classes, taking into account the substitution options. Such problems arise in a variety of revenue management contexts, including multicabin aircraft, back-to-back scheduled flights on the same leg, hotels with multiple room types, and mixed-vehicle car rental fleets.

The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management is a book that comprehensively covers theory and practice of the entire field, including both quantity and price-based RM, as well as significant coverage of supporting topics such as forecasting and economics. The authors believe such a comprehensive approach is necessary to fully understand the subject. A central objective of the book is to unify the various forms of RM and to link them closely to each other and to the supporting fields of statistics and economics.

This paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium model for an oligopoly, in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined. We propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are dunctions of all retailers' prices and all retailers' service levels. We proceed with the investigation of the equilibrium behavior of infinite-horizon models for industries facing this type of generalized competition, under demand uncertainty.