11/17/22 | 4:15pm | E51-145

Mor Armony

Harvey Golub Professor of Business Leadership
NYU Stern School of Business

Abstract: Contrary to traditional queueing theory, recent field studies in health care and call centers indicate that pooling queues may not lead to operational efficiencies relative to dedicated queues. We use a series of three experiments to examine the conditions under which this may be the case and to test servers’ customer ownership and queue length awareness as behavioral mechanisms that may explain why. We find that in contexts where servers may build more of a human connection to their customers, dedicated queues outperform pooled queues with respect to speed without sacrificing quality; we find no difference in contexts where they are less likely to build a connection to their customers. We find that servers’ queue length awareness partially mediates this effect while their psychological ownership of customers in queue partially suppresses it. When servers experience a change in queue configuration, we find that the higher levels of queue length awareness and shorter processing times persist across the change in operating conditions, but this carryover effect does not exist with respect to the psychological ownership of customers in queue. This suggests that the gains in operational performance and queue length awareness when servers go from being in a pooled queue to a dedicated queue outweigh the losses when they experience the queue configurations in the opposite order, but the same does not hold for psychological ownership of customers in queue.

This is joint work with Hummy Song (Wharton) and Guillaume Roels (INSEAD)

Bio: Mor Armony is the Vice Dean of Faculty, Harvey Golub Professor of Business Leadership, and Professor of Technology, Operations & Statistics at New York University Stern School of Business. Professor Armony teaches courses in operations management and in service operations.

Professor Armony's primary research areas of interest include management of patient flow in healthcare, optimization of customer experience in contact centers, and general stochastic modeling of various operations. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Management Science, Operations Research, and Queueing Systems.

Before joining NYU Stern, Professor Armony served as a consultant for Lucent Technologies and for AT&T. She also developed mathematical models for the prediction of financial indexes at Eventus, Israel.

Professor Armony received her Bachelor of Science in mathematics and statistics and her Master of Science in statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also received a Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy in engineering-economic systems and operations research from Stanford University.