Knowledge that Transforms

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value—and at the same time fundamentally limited—in their ability to characterize system performance.We review the state of research on telephone call centers. We begin with a tutorial on how call centers function and proceed to survey academic research devoted to the management of their operations. We then outline important problems that have not been addressed and identify promising directions for future research.

The profitability of remanufacturing depends on the quantity and quality of product returns and on the demand for remanufactured products. The quantity and quality of product returns can be influenced by varying quality-dependent acquisition prices, i.e., by using product acquisition management. Demand can be influenced by varying the selling price. We develop a simple framework for determining the optimal prices and the corresponding profitability. We motivate and illustrate our framework using an application from the cellular telephone industry.

In this paper, we examine the research and results of dynamic pricing policies and their relation to revenue management. The survey is based on a generic revenue management problem in which a perishable and nonrenewable set of resources satisfy stochastic price sensitive demand processes over a finite period of time. In this class of problems, the owner (or the seller) of these resources uses them to produce and offer a menu of final products to the end customers. Within this context, we formulate the stochastic control problem of capacity that the seller faces: How to dynamically set the menu and the quantity of products and their corresponding prices to maximize the total revenue over the selling horizon.