管理科学系学术讲座（4月6日）

时间：2023年4月6日（周四） 13:30-15:30

地点：管理学院史带楼303室

主题：Pooling Servers for Customer-Intensive Services: Theory and Experimental Evidence

主讲人：王钟彬天津大学管理与经济学部副教授

主持人：吴肖乐复旦大学管理学院教授

摘要：In customer-intensive services where service quality increases with service time, service providers commonly pool their agents to serve customers. An agent exerts effort serving customers, and typically receives a performance bonus (e.g., tips) that is increasing in customer satisfaction, for each customer served. Conventional wisdom suggests that pooling agents reduces customer waiting time while performance bonuses motivate agents to produce high quality service, both of which should boost customer satisfaction. However, our queueing-game-theoretic analysis reveals that when agents act strategically, they may choose to speed up under pooling in an attempt to serve more customers, thus undermining service quality. If this happens, pooling can backfire and result in both lower customer satisfaction and agent payoff. We propose a simple solution to resolve this issue by pooling a certain amount of agents' performance bonuses (incentive pooling) in conjunction with pooling agents (operational pooling). Our behavioral experiment largely confirms our theoretical findings about agent behavior: experiment participants choose to speed up as agents when pooled, but decide to spend longer time serving each customer under our proposed incentive pooling policy.

主讲人简介：王钟彬，现就职于天津大学管理与经济学部，担任英才副教授。主要研究方向为运营管理，消费者驱动的服务运营，以及平台经济下的供应链管理。主持国家自然科学基金青年基金1项，第八届中国科协青年人才托举工程项目，博士后项目1项，以主要参与人参与国家自然科学基金重点项目1项。以第一作者或通讯作者发表高水平论文10余篇，其中在运营管理类国际顶尖刊物《Operations Research》,《Management Science》,《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》，《Production and Operations Management》等发表数篇学术论文。相关学术成果曾获2022年“全国供应链与运营管理”最佳会议论文一等奖，2021年美国运筹学与管理学研究协会(INFORMS)服务科学最佳论文一等奖，2021年第十三届“行为运筹学与行为运营管理”研讨会青年教师优秀论文奖，中国系统工程学会第六届“系统科学与系统工程科学技术奖”优博奖，以及2021年管理科学与工程学会“优秀博士学位论文奖励计划”。