Subject：The Impact of Information Granularity and Priority in Managing Strategic Customers' Service Choices

Guest：HU Yue, Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Host：SUN Hailong, Assistant Professor, ACEM

Time：10:00-11:30am. Wednesday, Dec 20, 2023

Venue：Tecent Meeting (Please email to yuxin.su@sjtu.edu.cn for the meeting ID and password.）

Abstract：

We study service systems with two types of service providers: the specialist and the generalist. The specialist can fulfill the service requirement of all customers, whereas the generalist can successfully serve customers with a probability that decreases with the customer’s service complexity level. Upon an unfulfilled visit at the generalist, the customer needs a follow-up visit at the specialist. We model customers’ strategic choices between the two service providers as a queueing game, and characterize the equilibrium of the queueing game and the socially optimal customer choices. We investigate the impact of information granularity, and find that improving customers’ perception of their service complexity levels is not always optimal. This limitation can be overcome by simultaneously deploying a priority rule that can induce the social optimum.

演讲人简介：

Yue Hu is an Assistant Professor of Operations, Information &Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research lies at the intersection of healthcare operations management and applied probability. With particular focus on scheduling, staffing, and patient-flow management in healthcare delivery systems, she studies how to leverage predictive analytics to guide operational strategies and innovations. In addition to solving practically relevant problems, she conducts research in developing new methodologies for the approximation and control of stochastic systems. Hu’s research has been recognized in a number of competitions, including as the finalist of the 2022 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Competition, winner of the 2020 INFORMS APS Best Student Paper Award, finalist of the 2019 INFORMS IBM Best Student Paper Award, and honorable mention in the 2017 INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize. Hu received her PhD from the Decision, Risk and Operations Division at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she received a BS from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University.