Masha Shunko

Humans Are Not Machines: The Behavioral Impact of Queueing Design on Service Time

Using behavioral experiments, we study the impact of queue design on worker productivity in service systems that involve human servers. Specifically, we consider two queue design features: queue structure, which can either be parallel queues (multiple queues with a dedicated server per queue) or a single queue (a pooled queue served by multiple servers); and queue-length visibility, which can provide either full or blocked visibility. We find that 1) the single-queue structure slows down the servers, illustrating a drawback of pooling; and 2) poor visibility of the queue length slows down the servers; however, this effect may be mitigated, or even reversed, by pay schemes that incentivize the servers for fast performance. We provide additional managerial insights by isolating two behavioral drivers behind these results – task interdependence and saliency of feedback.

Pareto-Improving Coordination Policies in Queueing Systems with Independent Service Agents

One of the well known methods to improve performance in a queueing system is implementing coordination policies that balance the load among servers. However, in decentralized queueing systems where each service agent can decide whether to participate in the coordination mechanism or not, a sustainable policy has to not only benefit the system, but also be beneficial to all agents. In particular, agents are willing to participate in a coordination policy only if the performance of their individual queue is not hindered and if their revenues are not decreased. As a motivating example, we use the emergency medicine setting, in which emergency departments (EDs) act as independent agents and overcrowding in the EDs has direct impact on the quality of service. In such setting, EDs are interested in seeing improvements in performance measures that address the expected number of patients (or expected census, which is a widely studied and applied metric in the emergency medicine literature) and the risk of having high census. We focus on reducing the expected census, the variance of census, the probability of having high census, and the expected census in the overcrowded state; and propose classes of coordination policies that provide improvement on all of these measures for all agents. In addition, agents who receive revenue based on the processed load, are interested in preserving the long-term average load. Hence, our proposed classes of coordination policies guarantee that the expected arrival rate and hence, the expected revenue, is preserved for each agent in the system. We include a discussion of the implementation issues and propose a policy that is easy to implement in practice.

Should a Multinational Firm Place Part of its Supply Chain in a Tax Haven?: Strategies to Enable International Tax Arbitrage

What motivates the geographic footprint of the supply chains that multinational firms (MNFs) deploy? Traditional prescriptive research in the operations and supply chain management literature tends to recommend locations primarily based on differentials in production costs and the ramifications of physical distance. The role of taxation has received much less attention.MNFs that strategically position parts of their supply chains in low-tax locations can allocate the profits across the different pieces of the firm so as to improve post-tax profits. For the profit allocation to be defensible to tax authorities, the operations in tax havens must possess real decision authority and bear meaningful risks such as the consequences of uncertainty in market demand. Generally speaking, the greater the transfer of risk and control, the larger the allowable allocation of profit. These transfers may also create inefficiencies due to misalignment of business goals and attitudes towards risk. We model these tradeoffs in the context of placing in a low-tax region a subsidiary that oversees product distribution (as a Commissionaire, Limited-Risk Distributor, or Fully-Fledged Distributor). Our analysis ultimately informs the questions of motive for the MNF: whether and when to use these tax-aware supply chain strategies.