Nagesh Gavirneni from Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, will visit Thayer Oct 26^th-28^th.  He will be giving a talk on Thursday, October 27^th, 3:00pm-4:00pm, in Cummings 118, titled “Self-Selecting Priority Queues with Burr Distributed Waiting Costs”. 

Abstract:

Service providers, in the presence of congestion and heterogeneity of customer waiting costs, often introduce a fee-based premier option using which the customers self-segment themselves. Examples of this practice are found in health care, amusement parks, government (consular services), and transportation. Using a single-server queuing system  with customer waiting costs modeled as a Burr Distribution, we perform a detailed analysis to (i) determine the conditions (fees, cost structure, etc.) under which this strategy is profitable for the service provider, (ii) quantify the benefits accrued by the premier customers; and (iii) evaluate the resulting impact on the other customers. We show that such  self-selecting priority systems  can be pareto-improving in the sense that they are beneficial to everyone. These benefits are larger when the variance in the customer waiting costs is high and the system utilization is high. We use income data from the poorest and richest areas (identified by zipcode) in the United States along with the countrywide income distribution to illustrate our results. Numerical results indicate that planning for a 20–40% enrollment in the high-priority option is robust in ensuring that all the stakeholders benefit from the proposed strategy.

Bio:

Nagesh Gavirneni is a professor of operations management in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His research interests are in the areas of supply chain management, inventory control, production scheduling, simulation, and optimization. He is now using these models and methodologies to solve problems in healthcare, agriculture and humanitarian logistics in developing countries. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, the chief algorithm design engineer of SmartOps, a Software Architect at Maxager Technology, Inc., and a research scientist with Schlumberger. He has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT-Madras, a Master’s degree from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.