Production and Operations Management最新文献

{"title":"EXPRESS: How Do Curbside Feedback Tactics Impact Households' Recycling Performance? Evidence from Community Programs","authors":"Erin C. McKie, Aravind Chandrasekaran, Sriram Venkataraman","doi":"10.1177/10591478241234999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241234999","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the responsibility for advancing the circular economy has been directed towards firms, yet many reuse opportunities can only be achieved through environmentally compliant, household-level recycling behaviors. In response, policymakers and recycling organizations are using a range of feedback mechanisms to promote household recycling that meets local quality standards. However, the effectiveness of these tactics remains unclear, and stakeholders are divided on the appropriateness of their use. In this research, we examine the role of two popular feedback mechanisms - information-only and information plus penalty - in correcting households' curbside recycling behaviors. With information-only feedback, households are provided with best practices for recycling and are not penalized for their errors. With information plus penalty feedback, house­holds also receive information, but temporarily forfeit their recycling services. While previous studies have explored the use of information and penalties as feedback mechanisms to guide behavioral changes, there is mixed evidence on their effectiveness, particularly in the recycling context. We address this research gap by analyzing unique data collected from a 2019 curbside auditing effort that occurred in a large, Mid-Western city. Our analysis leverages econometric methods, and recycling feedback and performance data from 25,359 audits across 11,899 households and 15 recycling routes. We find that information-only feedback mechanisms, while preferred by some stakeholders, are not associated with improvements in recycling quality (measured using household contamination rates). By contrast, our results indicate that punitive mechanisms (i.e., infor­mation plus penalty) involving cart refusals are associated with significant reductions in contamination rates: i.e., households that receive punitive feedback reduce their contamination rate severity by 59%, and are 75% less likely to commit a violation in the future. More importantly, we do not find evidence that punitive feedback mechanisms generally discourage households' participation in recycling programs (measured using future set out rates). Our study informs sustainable operations management literature by investigating how curbside feedback mechanisms, with differing levels of severity, influence critical dimensions of households' recycling performance (i.e., recycling quality and participation). We also inform policymakers on how curb- side feedback mechanisms can be more effectively leveraged to enhance opportunities for material reuse.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139778062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Add-On Pricing: a Queueing Perspective","authors":"Chenguang (Allen) Wu, Chen Jin, Ying-Ju Chen","doi":"10.1177/10591478241234994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241234994","url":null,"abstract":"This work is motivated by the practice of add-on services, where an add-on is not valuable unless purchased with a main service. Discrepancies in pricing have been observed in various settings such as restaurants, museums, and attractions regarding whether the add-on should be sold together with the main service, or separately from the main service at an additional charge. While there has been a vast literature on add-on pricing, its application in service-oriented businesses with congestion-prone externalities and delay-sensitive customers is less understood. We develop a queueing model and examine the optimal pricing of add-on services in such systems, and in line with practice, we focus on analyzing two pricing schemes: bundling that charges a single price to sell main and add-on services altogether, and separate selling that charges distinct prices for each service. We establish that in the absence of congestion, separate selling strictly dominates bundling across the board. When there is congestion at the main service but not the add-on, bundling can be more lucrative under a large customer demand. When congestion takes place at both services, separate selling can return to being dominant under a large customer demand. We explain these plots of reversals by illustrating an intricate interplay between pricing, market coverage, and congestion. Collectively, they reveal novel operational advantages of each pricing scheme in exploiting the fundamentals of add-on structures.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139777725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: An Investigation into Demographic Disparities in Emergency Department Disposition Decisions","authors":"Qian Cheng, N. T. Argon, Christopher S. Evans, Peter Lin, B. Linthicum, Yufeng Liu, Abhi Mehrotra, Mehul D. Patel, S. Ziya","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235000","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the presence of health disparities in emergency department (ED) disposition decisions and if crowding levels might have an exacerbating role. Using data from a large, academic Emergency Department (ED), we find statistically significant associations between ED disposition decisions and patient sex, race, as well as ethnicity, with male, Caucasian, and non-Hispanic patients being more likely to be admitted to the hospital compared with respectively, female, African-American, and Hispanic patients. In line with earlier findings in other studies, we find that longer waiting times, suggesting higher levels of ED crowding, is associated with higher rates of admission. Moreover, longer ED wait times modified sex differences, suggesting that the disposition disparity in female patients might be exacerbated when the ED is more crowded.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139778091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Subscription Pricing for Free Delivery Services","authors":"Anantaram Balakrishnan, Shankar Sundaresan, Chinmoy Mohapatra","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235001","url":null,"abstract":"Many firms that offer home delivery of products purchased online now provide consumers the option of subscribing to a membership plan for free delivery of limited or unlimited number of orders instead of customers paying delivery charges for each order. This paper seeks to understand the benefits to firms and consumers of introducing such free-delivery subscription (FDS) plans to complement their traditional pay-for-delivery (PFD) option, characterize the firm's optimal FDS subscription pricing strategy, and study the effects of product, consumer, and market characteristics on the subscription fees and firm's profits. We develop and analyze an economic model that incorporates salient features of product delivery settings that prior models of subscription pricing do not fully capture. The features include simultaneous availability of PFD and FDS options, lift in a consumer's demand when she switches from PFD to FDS, the possibility of attracting new consumers when the firm introduces FDS, and order batching by customers due to per-order delivery charges and free-delivery order allowances. Our utility-based approach to model consumers' purchasing choices incorporates consumer heterogeneity both in terms of their utility for the product and their shopping preference under the PFD option. For homogeneous consumers, we show that introducing a FDS plan raises the firm's profit, establish the optimality of offering unlimited free-delivery allowance, and analyze comparative statics. With multiple customer types, our analysis of two subscription pricing strategies for FDS plans – a single “Universal” plan and multiple “Tiered” plans with varying subscription fees and free-delivery limits – leads to several interesting insights on delivery pricing strategies, as well as drivers and sensitivity of the optimal policy, profits, and number of subscribers. We supplement this analysis with extensive computational experiments that reveal a substantial increase in profits when a firm adds one or more FDS plans to its PFD option even though the optimal subscription fee(s) only covers part of the firm's actual shipping costs. These results also permit us to gauge the influence and understand the trends in the profitability of the Universal and Tiered plans as various parameters change.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139836849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: How Do Curbside Feedback Tactics Impact Households' Recycling Performance? Evidence from Community Programs","authors":"Erin C. McKie, Aravind Chandrasekaran, Sriram Venkataraman","doi":"10.1177/10591478241234999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241234999","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the responsibility for advancing the circular economy has been directed towards firms, yet many reuse opportunities can only be achieved through environmentally compliant, household-level recycling behaviors. In response, policymakers and recycling organizations are using a range of feedback mechanisms to promote household recycling that meets local quality standards. However, the effectiveness of these tactics remains unclear, and stakeholders are divided on the appropriateness of their use. In this research, we examine the role of two popular feedback mechanisms - information-only and information plus penalty - in correcting households' curbside recycling behaviors. With information-only feedback, households are provided with best practices for recycling and are not penalized for their errors. With information plus penalty feedback, house­holds also receive information, but temporarily forfeit their recycling services. While previous studies have explored the use of information and penalties as feedback mechanisms to guide behavioral changes, there is mixed evidence on their effectiveness, particularly in the recycling context. We address this research gap by analyzing unique data collected from a 2019 curbside auditing effort that occurred in a large, Mid-Western city. Our analysis leverages econometric methods, and recycling feedback and performance data from 25,359 audits across 11,899 households and 15 recycling routes. We find that information-only feedback mechanisms, while preferred by some stakeholders, are not associated with improvements in recycling quality (measured using household contamination rates). By contrast, our results indicate that punitive mechanisms (i.e., infor­mation plus penalty) involving cart refusals are associated with significant reductions in contamination rates: i.e., households that receive punitive feedback reduce their contamination rate severity by 59%, and are 75% less likely to commit a violation in the future. More importantly, we do not find evidence that punitive feedback mechanisms generally discourage households' participation in recycling programs (measured using future set out rates). Our study informs sustainable operations management literature by investigating how curbside feedback mechanisms, with differing levels of severity, influence critical dimensions of households' recycling performance (i.e., recycling quality and participation). We also inform policymakers on how curb- side feedback mechanisms can be more effectively leveraged to enhance opportunities for material reuse.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139837689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Add-On Pricing: a Queueing Perspective","authors":"Chenguang (Allen) Wu, Chen Jin, Ying-Ju Chen","doi":"10.1177/10591478241234994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241234994","url":null,"abstract":"This work is motivated by the practice of add-on services, where an add-on is not valuable unless purchased with a main service. Discrepancies in pricing have been observed in various settings such as restaurants, museums, and attractions regarding whether the add-on should be sold together with the main service, or separately from the main service at an additional charge. While there has been a vast literature on add-on pricing, its application in service-oriented businesses with congestion-prone externalities and delay-sensitive customers is less understood. We develop a queueing model and examine the optimal pricing of add-on services in such systems, and in line with practice, we focus on analyzing two pricing schemes: bundling that charges a single price to sell main and add-on services altogether, and separate selling that charges distinct prices for each service. We establish that in the absence of congestion, separate selling strictly dominates bundling across the board. When there is congestion at the main service but not the add-on, bundling can be more lucrative under a large customer demand. When congestion takes place at both services, separate selling can return to being dominant under a large customer demand. We explain these plots of reversals by illustrating an intricate interplay between pricing, market coverage, and congestion. Collectively, they reveal novel operational advantages of each pricing scheme in exploiting the fundamentals of add-on structures.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139837597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: An Investigation into Demographic Disparities in Emergency Department Disposition Decisions","authors":"Qian Cheng, N. T. Argon, Christopher S. Evans, Peter Lin, B. Linthicum, Yufeng Liu, Abhi Mehrotra, Mehul D. Patel, S. Ziya","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235000","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the presence of health disparities in emergency department (ED) disposition decisions and if crowding levels might have an exacerbating role. Using data from a large, academic Emergency Department (ED), we find statistically significant associations between ED disposition decisions and patient sex, race, as well as ethnicity, with male, Caucasian, and non-Hispanic patients being more likely to be admitted to the hospital compared with respectively, female, African-American, and Hispanic patients. In line with earlier findings in other studies, we find that longer waiting times, suggesting higher levels of ED crowding, is associated with higher rates of admission. Moreover, longer ED wait times modified sex differences, suggesting that the disposition disparity in female patients might be exacerbated when the ED is more crowded.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139837703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Subscription Pricing for Free Delivery Services","authors":"Anantaram Balakrishnan, Shankar Sundaresan, Chinmoy Mohapatra","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235001","url":null,"abstract":"Many firms that offer home delivery of products purchased online now provide consumers the option of subscribing to a membership plan for free delivery of limited or unlimited number of orders instead of customers paying delivery charges for each order. This paper seeks to understand the benefits to firms and consumers of introducing such free-delivery subscription (FDS) plans to complement their traditional pay-for-delivery (PFD) option, characterize the firm's optimal FDS subscription pricing strategy, and study the effects of product, consumer, and market characteristics on the subscription fees and firm's profits. We develop and analyze an economic model that incorporates salient features of product delivery settings that prior models of subscription pricing do not fully capture. The features include simultaneous availability of PFD and FDS options, lift in a consumer's demand when she switches from PFD to FDS, the possibility of attracting new consumers when the firm introduces FDS, and order batching by customers due to per-order delivery charges and free-delivery order allowances. Our utility-based approach to model consumers' purchasing choices incorporates consumer heterogeneity both in terms of their utility for the product and their shopping preference under the PFD option. For homogeneous consumers, we show that introducing a FDS plan raises the firm's profit, establish the optimality of offering unlimited free-delivery allowance, and analyze comparative statics. With multiple customer types, our analysis of two subscription pricing strategies for FDS plans – a single “Universal” plan and multiple “Tiered” plans with varying subscription fees and free-delivery limits – leads to several interesting insights on delivery pricing strategies, as well as drivers and sensitivity of the optimal policy, profits, and number of subscribers. We supplement this analysis with extensive computational experiments that reveal a substantial increase in profits when a firm adds one or more FDS plans to its PFD option even though the optimal subscription fee(s) only covers part of the firm's actual shipping costs. These results also permit us to gauge the influence and understand the trends in the profitability of the Universal and Tiered plans as various parameters change.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139777387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Racial Bias in Pain Measurement Frequency in ICUs and Its Impact on Early Readmission","authors":"Gaurav Jetley, He Zhang","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235003","url":null,"abstract":"A significant portion of hospitalizations result in readmissions, many of which are preventable. Additionally, over a quarter of admissions necessitate intensive care unit (ICU) stays. These trends impose significant strain on healthcare systems, leading to penalties and reduced reimbursements for healthcare facilities. Consequently, reducing readmissions stands as a critical priority for healthcare institutions, with a specific focus on ICU processes and procedures. While some healthcare processes, such as vital sign monitoring, are consistent across patient cohorts, disparities in pain management have been well-documented. Existing research predominantly explores biases in outpatient settings, particularly in the underestimation and undertreatment of pain for Black patients. However, these biases can extend to the frequency of pain measurements in ICUs, where continuous monitoring plays a pivotal role in patient care. This study investigates disparities in pain measurement frequencies in ICUs for patients of different races and their impact on early readmission rates. Utilizing a dataset of ICU stays from a major U.S. healthcare institution, we employ mediation analysis with instrumental variables by performing a 2-step mediation analysis using IV-Probit estimator to answer these research questions. Our findings reveal that the frequency of pain measurements in ICU stays partially mediate the relationship between a patient's race and the probability of early readmission. Specifically, Black patients receive fewer pain measurements during their ICU stays compared to White patients, increasing their likelihood of 30-day readmission. This study represents the first to demonstrate that bias in pain management extends to the frequency of pain measurements in intensive care settings, shedding light on a critical aspect of healthcare disparities and their impact on readmission rates. The implications of our findings span healthcare practice, operations, and the growing body of literature on healthcare equity, offering valuable insights into addressing these disparities.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139778415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Men at Work…Unsafely: Gender Differences in Compliance with Safety Regulations in the Trucking Industry","authors":"Alex Scott, Beth Davis-Sramek, D. Ketchen","doi":"10.1177/10591478241235145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241235145","url":null,"abstract":"Although safety within operational systems depends on compliance with regulations, non-compliance is common in many settings. Trucking is a meaningful industry for studying operational safety compliance given that the industry is large and important, truck accidents kill thousands annually, and such accidents collectively cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars. Although the truck driving occupation is dominated by men, significant efforts are underway to recruit more women into the profession. If women are safer behind the wheel than men, increasing their ranks could improve overall safety compliance. Building on theory and evidence suggesting that men have a greater willingness to take risky actions and break rules, we used data on 22 million truck inspections from 2010 to 2022 to identify an operational safety compliance gap between men and women truckers. Overall, men were 7.4% more likely to be cited for a major violation of rules governing working hours (known as hours-of-service or HOS rules) and 13.2% more likely to have a major unsafe driving violation. We then examined whether gap changes based on carrier size and type. We found that the HOS compliance gap is smaller for small carriers (vs. large) and private carriers (vs. for-hire), but not the unsafe driving gap. Finally, we tested whether the introduction of an intervention—electronic logging devices (ELDs) that automatically record truckers' driving hours—closes the gap by increasing men's compliance. In line with predictions, differences between men and women disappeared after the mandate; but again, only for HOS compliance. Surprisingly, women had significantly more HOS violations in 2021 and 2022 than men—an outcome that may be tied to women truckers' personal safety issues. In summary, the results and additional robustness checks indicate that men committed more unsafe driving violations (e.g., speeding) than women across the entire study period, while the pattern of HOS violations varied based on external events. We conclude by highlighting possible pathways for reducing the number of collisions involving trucks and thus lowering the number of fatalities and extent of economic losses.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139779425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}