Pricing computer services: queueing effects
Communications of the ACM
Flexible manufacturing systems: a review of analytical models
Management Science
Optimal incentive-compatible priority pricing for the M/M/1 queue
Operations Research
User delay costs and internal pricing for a service facility
Management Science
Scheduling workforce and workflow in a high volume factory
Management Science
Staffing and Allocation of Workers in An Administrative Office
Management Science
Gatekeepers and Referrals in Services
Management Science
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Strategic and competitive information systems
Managing Patient Service in a Diagnostic Medical Facility
Operations Research
Are Pre-Processing and Prioritization Preferable in Service Systems?
HICSS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Information Hang-overs in Healthcare Service Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Queuing system for different classes of customers
International Journal of Business Information Systems
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This paper examines prioritization in a service system and analyzes whether, in the presence of heterogeneous customers who have different needs and a costly sorting process, it pays to prioritize. In particular, in our model, sorting is costly because the task of gathering information to prioritize jobs consumes resources. We investigate a stylized model in which there are two classes of jobs - one whose waiting cost is high, called urgent, and the other whose waiting cost is low, called non-urgent. There are two types of employees, sorters, who collect information on a job and then decide whether it is urgent or non-urgent, and processors, who execute the job or provide the service. We begin by assuming that sorters categorize customers perfectly, and we relax this assumption later in the paper. We optimize two performance metrics, waiting costs (under a given budget) and total costs, and find the conditions under which prioritization is beneficial for these two metrics.