New direct load control programs are being rolled out by utilities across the country. Traditional one-way, single-mode switch technologies are being replaced by remotely adjustable thermostats and adaptive switch technologies that learn how customers’ air conditioners actually operate over time and then optimize load impacts during events. Adaptive switches are designed to reduce air condition...

EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF REVENUE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES: UNDERSTAND YOUR COMPETITION AND CUSTOMERS Jun Li Gerard Cachon This dissertation empirically examines factors that challenge revenue management practices in travel industry — air-travel and lodging. In particular, it focuses on strategic interactions among firms and strategic interactions between firms and customers. While most traditional reve...

Customer satisfaction is the key factor for successful and depends highly on the behaviors of frontline service providers. Customers should be managed as assets, and that customers vary in their needs, preferences, and buying behavior. This study applied the Taiwan Customer Satisfaction Index model to a tourism factory to analyze customer satisfaction and loyalty. We surveyed 242 customers serv...

Motivated by the fast growing practice of web analytics, we study whether strategic customers are willing to click. Clicking reveals advance demand information which the firm can use to reduce demand-supply mismatch cost thereby increasing product availability to customers. Using newsvendor models that incorporate customers who anticipate that their clicks are tracked, we demonstrate how the ma...

Emerging ATM-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) services offer customers a flexible way to interconnect Customer Premises Networks (CPNs) via high-speed links. Compared with traditional leased lines, these services allow for rapid provisioning of VPN bandwidth through cooperative control between customer and provider. Customers can dynamically renegotiate the VPN bandwidth according to their c...

a r t i c l e i n f o The customer lifetime value combines into one construct the transaction timing, spending and dropout processes that characterize the purchase behavior of customers. Recently, the potential relationship between these processes , either at the individual customer level (i.e. intra-customer correlation) or between customers (i.e. inter-customer correlation), has received more...

The traditional economics and queueing literature typically assume that customers are fully rational. In contrast, in this paper, we study canonical service models with boundedly rational customers. We capture bounded rationality using a framework in which better decisions are made more often, while the best decision needs not always be made. We investigate the impact of bounded rationality on ...

1. Introduction Facing continuously changing and highly competitive business environment, banks have invested heavily in information technology (IT) to enhance operating efficiency and sustain competitive advantage. Banks have deployed different IT to offer multiple service channels to serve customers and satisfy their needs. Strategically utilizing IT to optimize operating performance, banks h...

Customers deploying Business Critical Applications (BCAs) have requirements such as stringent SLAs, sustained high performance, and continued application availability. It is a major challenge for organizations to manage data storage in these environments. Common issues in using traditional storage solutions for BCAs include inadequate performance, storage inefficiency, difficulty to scale, comp...