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The purpose of this paper is to consider queuing systems where captive repeat customers select a service facility each period. Are people in such a distributed system, with limited information diffusion, able to approach optimal system performance? How are queues formed? How do people decide which queue to join based on past experience? The authors explore these questions, investigating the effect of information availability, as well as the effect of heterogeneous facility sizes, at the macro (system) and micro (individual performance) levels.

Experimental economics, using a queuing experiment.

The authors find little behavioural difference at the aggregate level, but observe significant variations at the individual level. This leads the authors to the conclusion that it is not sufficient to evaluate system performance by observing average customer allocation and sojourn times at the different facilities; one also needs to consider the individuals’ performance to understand how well the chosen design works. The authors also observe that better information diffusion does not necessarily improve system performance.

Evaluating system performance based on aggregate behaviour can be misleading; however, this is how many systems are evaluated in practice, when only aggregate performance measures are available. This can lead to suboptimal system designs.

There has been little theoretical or empirical work on queuing systems with captive repeat customers. This study contributes to the understanding of decision making in such systems, using laboratory experiments based on the cellular automata approach, but with all agents replaced by humans.

Because clustering of organizational activities in space induces – and at the same time emerges from patterns of imperfect connectivity among interacting agents, the study of geography and strategy necessarily hinges on assumptions about how agents are linked. Spatial structure matters for the evolutionary dynamics of organizations because social systems are prime examples of connected systems, i.e. systems whose collective properties emerge from interaction among a large number of component micro-elements. Starting from this proposition, in this paper we explore the value of the claim that a wide range of interesting organizational phenomena can be represented as the outcome of processes that occur in overlapping local neighborhoods embedded in more general network structures. We document how patterns of spatial organization are sensitive to assumptions about the range of local interaction and about expectation formation mechanisms that induce temporal interdependence in agents’ choice. Within the lattice world that we define we discover a concave relation between the sensitivity of individual agents to new information (cognitive inertia) and system-level performance. These results provide experimental evidence in favor of the general claim that the evolutionary dynamics of social systems are directly affected by patterns of spatial organization induced by network-based activities.

The paper aims to explore how power and gender influence decision making in an operational and risky context.

The authors run a laboratory experiment. The experimental factors are power and operational profitability. Power is manipulated using an episodic priming task, while profitability, by changing a newsvendor-type product’s procurement cost. Participants’ risk attitude is captured using a risk lottery.

Participants deviate from the optimal order regardless of the power condition and their risk profile. Risk-seeking women order consistently more than risk-seeking men, which allow women to offer a higher service level. In the low-profit condition, men prefer to make more conservative decisions, which allow them to place orders that are closer to the economical benchmark, where both men’ induced power and the risk-seeking tendencies from both genders play a role. Behavioural models in the high-power condition explain the observed differences in ordering behaviours.

This paper provides behavioural research to explore how differences in power and gender, and their links with risky decision making, influence decision making in an uncertain operations management context, representing thus an important departure from mainstream studies.

The purpose of this paper is to holistically discuss, explore and synthesise the key literature on visual management (VM), an important, yet highly fragmented subject that is frequently referred in lean production accounts.

An extensive literature review was conducted to classify the current literature, to explore the different aspects and limitations of the current discussions on the subject, to clarify in what ways VM benefits manifest themselves in a workplace and to identify the future research focus.

VM is an important close-range communication strategy based on cognitively effective information conveyance. This strategy has been frequently discussed in the production management literature. However, the literature is fragmented as to the roles of VM in a production setting; the body of literature lacks integrated focus and cohesion with an abundance of related terminology from scholarly works and consultant books; a practical VM tools taxonomy and a visual workplace implementation framework were presented; there is poor clarity with regards to the functions (benefits) that VM may provide within organisations, nine conceptual VM functions were proposed; a wide array of future research directions related to VM was identified.

This paper synthesises the key literature related to VM, providing a conceptual picture of the current knowledge.

A significant portion of academic research on marketing strategy focuses on how national brands of repeat-purchase goods are managed or should be managed. Surprisingly little consideration is given in this tradition to the extended role of geography, i.e. distance and space. For instance, manufacturers of brands in non-durable product categories are well aware of the fact that their national brands perform very different across domestic U.S. markets. This holds even for product categories with limited product differentiation. In this chapter, we outline various processes through which the influence of geography on performance of national brands materializes. We discuss a number of alternative explanations for the emergence and sustenance of spatial concentration of market shares. Several of these explanations are modeled empirically using data from the United States packaged goods industry. This chapter closes with avenues for further academic research on spatial aspects of the growth of new products.

The purpose of this study is to formulate an algorithm designed to discern the optimal routes for efficient municipal solid waste (MSW) collection.

The research method is simulation. The proposed algorithm combines heuristics derived from the constructive genetic algorithm (CGA) and tabu search (TS). The algorithm is applied in a municipality located at Southern Brazil, with 40,000 inhabitants, circa.

The implementation achieved a remarkable 25.44% reduction in daily mileage of the vehicles, resulting in savings of 150.80 km/month and 1,809.60 km/year. Additionally, it reduced greenhouse gas emissions (including fossil CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, total CO₂e and biogenic CO₂) by an average of 26.15%. Moreover, it saved 39 min of daily working time.

Further research should thoroughly analyze the feasibility of decision-making regarding planning, scheduling and scaling municipal services using digital technology.

The municipality now has a tool to improve public management, mainly related with municipal solid waste. The municipality reduced the cost of public management of municipal solid waste, redirecting funds to other priorities, such as public health and education.

The study integrates MSW collection service with an online platform based on Google MapsTM. The advantages of employing geographical information systems are agility, low cost, adaptation to changes and accuracy.