In most banks, head tellers are responsible for the teller line. They set work schedules, ensure that the proper procedures are adhered to, and act as a mentor to less experienced tellers. In addition, head tellers may perform the typical duties of a teller as needed and deal with the more difficult customer problems. They may access the vault, ensure the correct cash balance is in the vault, a...

We utilize a new micro dataset of prices of funeral goods and services at individual funeral homes, plus data from the Census to examine the effects of state regulations that restrict entry into funeral goods market. In particular, some states have regulations that allow only licensed funeral homes to sell caskets, while others allow unlicensed retailers, such as Costco, to compete with funeral...

Higher market complexity and increasing competitive intensity are forcing traditional product-manufacturing companies to change their position in the goods–services continuum by continuously extending the service business. However, the existing literature tends to be somewhat vague in defining service strategies for manufacturing companies wishing to move along the continuum. The purpose of thi...

We propose a time-dependent network of innnite-server queues to help a service provider manage a family of private-line telecommunication services. The queueing network is used to model switching from one service to another. The relevant time scale is quite long: service lifetimes are measured in years, while service life cycles are measured in decades. To capture changing technology and custom...

Various performance measurement techniques have been developed and applied in their respective fields, but the existing performance measurement methods have failed to provide significant assistance in the context of marketing strategies and innovation levels of a firm. In this paper, we have considered an important aspect of marketing policy involving examining the decision of a firm to distrib...

Revised July, 2008 We examine the role of reservations in capacity-constrained services with a focus on restaurants. Although customers value reservations, restaurants typically neither charge for them nor impose penalties for failing to honor them. However, reservations impose costs on firms offering them. We highlight ways in which reservations can increase a firm’s sales by altering customer...

Data from the US population-based Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted from 1988 to 1994, were used to estimate the population prevalence, prevalence odds ratios, and attributable fractions for the association of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with employment by industry and occupation. The aim was to identify industries and occupations at increased ri...

..................................................................................................................................3 Introduction..............................................................................................................................3 Compelling Motivations to Outsource..................................................................................3 The Cu...

The proliferation of telecommunication services and the need to manage quality of service on an end-to-end basis require an approach for automatically selecting services that provide suucient quality of service at minimal cost. An agent-based approach is appropriate for such a purpose. For this reason, this paper presents a social carrier recommendation method, which is an essential component o...

Indicators are used to quantify the pressure of pesticides on the environment. Pesticide risk indicators typically require weighting environmental exposure by a no effect concentration. An indicator based on spread equivalents (ΣSeq) is used in environmental policy in Flanders (Belgium). The pesticide risk for aquatic life is estimated by weighting active ingredient usage by the ratio of their ...