Budgets as dynamic gatekeepers
Management Science
Commonalities in reengineered business processes: models and issues
Management Science
Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming
Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming
The Efficiency-Quality Trade-Off of Cross-Trained Workers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Performance-Based Incentives in a Dynamic Principal-Agent Model
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
HICSS '97 Proceedings of the 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: Information System Track-Organizational Systems and Technology - Volume 3
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Strategic and competitive information systems
Managing Response Time in a Call-Routing Problem with Service Failure
Operations Research
Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Incentives for Quality Through Endogenous Routing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Priority Assignment Under Imperfect Information on Customer Type Identities
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Knowledge sciences in services automation: integration models and perspectives for service centers
CASE'09 Proceedings of the fifth annual IEEE international conference on Automation science and engineering
The Effects of Competition on Referral Alliances of Professional Service Firms
Organization Science
Asymmetric Information and Economies of Scale in Service Contracting
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Modeling Security-Check Queues
Management Science
A redesign framework for call centers
BPM'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Business Process Management
On the impact of analyzing customer information and prioritizing in a service system
Decision Support Systems
Robust Design and Control of Call Centers with Flexible Interactive Voice Response Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Outsourcing a Two-Level Service Process
Management Science
Commentaries to “The Vital Role of Operations Analysis in Improving Healthcare Delivery”
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Information Hang-overs in Healthcare Service Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
This paper examines services in which customers encounter a gatekeeper who makes an initial diagnosis of the customer's problem and then may refer the customer to a specialist. The gatekeeper may also attempt to solve the problem, but the probability of treatment success decreases as the problem's complexity increases. Given the costs of treatment by the gatekeeper and the specialist, we find the firm's optimal referral rate from a particular gatekeeper to the specialists. We then consider the principal-agent problem that arises when the gatekeeper, but not the firm, observes the gatekeeper's treatment ability as well as the complexity of each customer's problem. We examine the relative benefits of compensation systems designed to overcome the effects of this information asymmetry and show that bonuses based solely on referral rates do not always ensure first-best system performance and that an appropriate bonus based on customer volume may be necessary as well. We also consider the value of such output-based contracts when gatekeepers are heterogeneous in ability, so that two gatekeeper types face different probabilities of treatment success when given the same problem. We show that the firm may achieve first-best performance by either offering two contracts that separate the gatekeeper types or by offering a single contract that coordinates the treatment decisions of both gatekeepers.