2014 M&SOM Best Paper Award

Abstract

I is a pleasure to announce that the 2014 Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Best Paper Award goes to Philipp Afeche for “IncentiveCompatible Revenue Management in Queueing Systems: Optimal Strategic Delay” for its contribution to theory and practice of operations management. The author will receive a $2,000 prize, contributed by the MSOM Society of INFORMS. Each year, all papers published in the journal during the past three years (2011–2013) are eligible for the award, and judging is done through a two-stage process. First, M&SOM Editor Steve Graves and a group of M&SOM associate editors select a small set of finalists from the nominations received. Second, an ad hoc committee, organized by the immediate past president of the MSOM Society, selects the best paper from among the finalists. This year, the ad hoc committee consisted of Charles Corbett, Jeremie Gallien, Amy Ward, and MSOM pastpresident Beril Toktay. They selected the winning paper from a set of five outstanding finalists. The winning paper studies the revenue-maximizing price and lead-time menu and scheduling policy in a queueing system when customers are heterogeneous with respect to their valuations and time sensitivity, and their type is not observable to the firm. A similar problem has been studied from the social optimality perspective. The novelty of this paper stems from the fact that it studies the problem from the point of view of revenue maximization. This makes a fundamental difference. From the social optimality perspective, it makes sense to consider only work-conserving scheduling policies (i.e., the server does not idle in the presence of a queue). This is not the case when the objective is revenue maximization: The firm may want to “strategically delay” the low-priority customers to make sure that the time-sensitive customers choose the high-price, fast-service option. The paper establishes the “strategic delay” concept and develops interesting managerial insights. The following reviewer commentary reflects points made by many of the reviewers: