General Information
Contact Information:
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
105 St. George Street
Toronto, ON M5S 3E6, Canada
☎: +1 416-978-4330
✉: yang.li10 [at] rotman.utoronto.ca
Research Interests: Service Operations, Consumer Behavior, Empirical OM, Supply Chain Management
Job Market Paper: Optimal Staffing under Endogenous Arrivals with Heterogeneous Customer Time-of-Service Preferences (To Be Posted)
I will present my JMP at INFORMS 2014 around 17:15, Sunday, Nov. 9, 2014 at Hilton-Franciscan B. Click here for details of my session SD17.
Abstract: The service operations literature usually treats arrivals as exogenous processes. However, arrival processes may be endogenous
in many settings. That is, customers may account for system congestion in choosing their time-of-service (TOS). This paper studies the following
four aspects of this interplay between customers’ TOS choices and the provider’s staffing decisions. First, we propose an equilibrium model that
captures how rational customers with heterogeneous TOS preferences and delay costs choose their TOS. Second, we characterize the system-optimal
staffing, TOS, and arrival rate decisions. Third, we show that the system-wide optimal solution is incentive-compatible with respect to customers’
TOS decisions, and we discuss the role of pricing in achieving the optimal arrival rates. Fourth, we illustrate how system performance may suffer
if the service provider ignores or incorrectly factors TOS preferences in staffing decisions.