BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Behavioral Drivers of Routing Decisions: Evidence from Restaurant 
 Table Assignment - Professor Bradley Staats\,  Associate Professor of Oper
 ations\, Kenan-Flagler Business School\, University of North Carolina
DTSTART:20160316T090000Z
DTEND:20160316T103000Z
UID:TALK65098@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Crystal
DESCRIPTION:Determining how best to route work is a key element of service
  system design. Not surprisingly then\, many analytical models have identi
 fied various optimal routing algorithms for service operations management.
  However\, in many settings\, humans make routing decisions dynamically\, 
 either because algorithms don’t exist\, decision support tools have not 
 been implemented\, or existing rules are not enforced. Understanding how i
 ndividuals make decisions creates the opportunity to identify both positiv
 e deviances\, as well as suboptimal decision making that can be improved. 
 Therefore\, in this paper we first theoretically identify the factors that
  may impact decision making before empirically examining a large operation
 al data set in a casual restaurant setting to research whether and how hos
 ts deviate from their predefined round-robin rule to seat customers to ser
 vers. We find that hosts assign customers earlier than what the round-robi
 n rule suggests to those servers who have low workload\, high speed skills
  but low sales skills\, and high familiarity with the hosts. In addition o
 ur models reveal that these seating heuristics are suboptimal in our setti
 ng and so we suggest an alternative seating heuristic to prioritize server
 s having high sales ability and estimate a potential sales lift between 2%
  and 3% through counterfactual analyses. Our research contributes both the
 oretically and practically as we use empirical methods to show not only ho
 w individuals make routing decisions\, but also how these decisions can be
  improved
LOCATION:Cambidge Judge Business School\,  Castle Teaching Room
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR