/pdf/the-theory-of-industrial-organization-19bejph0ej.pdf

The Theory of Industrial Organization

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.

In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

/pdf/the-modern-call-center-a-multi-disciplinary-perspective-on-2kcrgkbqth.pdf

The Modern Call Center: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

The Theory of Incentives I: The Principal-Agent Model

The Art and Science of Negotiation

https://iridia.ulb.ac.be/IridiaTrSeries/rev/IridiaTr2006-002r001.pdf

An Iterated Greedy heuristic for the sequence dependent setup times flowshop problem with makespan and weighted tardiness objectives

Patent intermediaries have gained importance as non-practicing entities in the innovation domain, buying innovations from an external provider and then licensing them to practicing firms. In this study, we analyze the competition between two identical incumbent firms and a patent intermediary for the acquisition and licensing of a cost-reducing innovation developed by an external innovator. We show that the outcome of the IP acquisition and licensing game critically depends on the degree of the cost-reducing innovation. Patent intermediaries win IP rights in patent markets if the innovation is incremental. They also win the IP rights when the innovation is moderate or radical, providing they have significant efficiency advantages over incumbent firms and the uncertainty about the degree of innovation is low. We also show that patent intermediaries serve to make markets more efficient. When the innovation is incremental or moderate, they help ensure a lower cost of production and a lower price for customers, and when the innovation is radical, they help increase the profits of the incumbent firms.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5918&context=lkcsb_research

Cost‐Reducing Innovation and the Role of Patent Intermediaries in Increasing Market Efficiency

Outsourcing of equipment repair and restoration is commonly practiced by firms across many industries. The operational performance of the equipment is determined by joint decisions of both the firm and the service provider. Although some decisions are verifiable (and thus directly contractible), many decisions in such settings are unverifiable. This naturally creates a double-sided moral hazard environment in which each party has incentives to free ride on the other party’s effort. A performance-based contract allows the firm to align the incentives of the service provider but also exposes the service provider to stochastic earnings that, in turn, create disincentives to the provider’s optimal decision making. To capture these issues, we develop a novel principal–agent model by integrating elements of the machine repairman model and a stochastic financial distress model within the double-sided moral hazard framework. We apply our model to solve the firm’s problem of designing the optimal performance-based contract. We find that the firm can attain the first-best profit by restricting the search space to only two classes of performance-based contract structures: linear and tiered. We show that the linear contract structure has only limited capacity for attaining the first-best outcome, contingent on the exogenous characteristics of the vendor. In contrast, the tiered contract structure allows the client to attain the first-best outcome regardless of vendor characteristics. Our results provide normative insights on the role of contract structures in eliminating any loss due to double-sided moral hazard or the vendor’s financial concerns. The results reported here also provide theoretical support for the extensive use of tiered contracts in practice.

Optimal Contracts for Outsourcing of Repair and Restoration Services

We explore the procurement of influenza vaccines by a government whose objective is to minimize the expected social costs (including vaccine, vaccine administration, and influenza treatment costs) when a for-profit vaccine supplier has production yield uncertainty, private information about its productivity (adverse selection) and potentially unverifiable production effort (moral hazard). Timeliness is important – costs for both the supplier and the government procurer may increase if part of the vaccine order is delivered after a scheduled delivery date. We theoretically derive the optimal menu of output-based contracts to minimize information rent, and numerically identify key drivers of that information rent. We also present a novel way to eliminate that information rent if the manufacturer’s effort is also verifiable, a counter intuitive result because the manufacturer has private productivity information. This provides an upper bound on how much a government should spend to monitor the manufacturer’s effort.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1990277

Information Elicitation and Influenza Vaccine Production

We study incentive alignment to coordinate operations in humanitarian settings. Our research focuses on transportation, the second largest overhead cost to humanitarian organizations after personnel. Motivated by field research, we study the fleet size problem from a managerial perspective. In terms of transportation, the objective of humanitarian Programs is to have a vehicle available whenever it's needed; the bigger the fleet, the higher the availability (the lower the cost of delay). On the other hand, the bigger the fleet, the higher the fleet cost. Fleet cost is the responsibility of the National Logistics. The different focus of the Programs and the National Logistics creates misaligned incentives that may lead to sub-optimal performance of a decentralized system. At the top of the system, the Headquarter must design incentive mechanisms to balance the operating cost of the fleet with the equity cost represented by cost of delay. The incentive alignment issue is complex in a humanitarian setting as traditional instruments based on financial rewards and penalties are not considered as viable options. The problem is complicated further by information asymmetry in the system due to the disperse geographical location of Programs, National Logistics and Headquarter. We propose a novel mechanism design for the incentive alignment problem where the Programs have private information regarding their true transportation needs. This study contributes to the humanitarian logistics literature and to the incentives in operations management literature.

/pdf/an-operational-mechanism-design-for-fleet-management-20febflvfd.pdf

An Operational Mechanism Design for Fleet Management Coordination in Humanitarian Operations

We consider contracting issues in the care of patients with chronic conditions within the principal-agent framework The government, acting as a principal, contracts with several health care providers in an effort to maximise population health minus the cost We consider the decision of whether to contract with individual health care providers or groups of such providers, as well as which contract type to use We show that the first best outcome can be achieved by both individual and group contracts through the use of either outcomes-adjusted capitation or outcomes-adjusted per-patient contracts We also examine possible issues which can arise as the entities that are contracted with are not necessarily the ones making decisions about patient care Individual contracts can fail to provide the desired incentives if providers under such contracts jointly make decisions about the care for their patients (collusion); however, so can group contracts if the group members fail to coordinate their actions (free-riding) We show that both of those result in potential deviations from optimal decisions, with direction and magnitude of deviation depending on the contract type held We conduct numerical experiments calibrated using data from United Kingdom's NHS and demonstrate that individual outcomes-adjusted capitation contracts are the most robust to these adverse effects

Sameer Hasija

Papers

Cost‐Reducing Innovation and the Role of Patent Intermediaries in Increasing Market Efficiency

Optimal Contracts for Outsourcing of Repair and Restoration Services

Information Elicitation and Influenza Vaccine Production

An Operational Mechanism Design for Fleet Management Coordination in Humanitarian Operations

Outcomes-Based Reimbursement Policies for Chronic Care Pathways