Social media platforms for healthcare services are changing how patients choose doctors. The digitization of healthcare reviews has enabled patients to thoroughly evaluate doctors before booking an appointment, and has increased the transparency of the relationship between patients and doctors. In this paper, we wish to derive the impact of online information on patient choice of outpatient care doctors. We are especially interested in how operational factors influence demand.

We create a quality value chain network concept to analyze the impact of supply chain quality (SCQ) on the customer lifetime value (CLV). We apply our framework to a rich dataset from a major restaurant chain utilizing text analysis of the complaints to measure SCQ, a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model with instruments to assess the impact of SCQ on customer experience, and a structural model of consumer purchasing behavior to eventually link customer experience to CLV.

We consider the dynamic pricing and rationing policy of a firm facing strategic customers under the influence of shortage effect. We provide conditions under which it is optimal for the firm to ration. We also identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of steady state. We also characterize the firm’s pricing and rationing policy under this steady state.

The issue of allocating capacity to accommodate emergent surgery cases while scheduling elective patients has major policy implications for Level-1 trauma centers including most large academic medical centers. This is because operating rooms (ORs) are the greatest source of revenues for hospitals, while also being the largest cost centers. However, scheduling ORs, especially at level-1 trauma hospitals, is challenging due to significant uncertainty in the arrivals of patients requiring emergent surgery.

The introduction of on-demand ride-hailing platforms totally changed the way people commute. In recent years, several firms entered this market to directly compete with traditional taxi companies. Some of these online platforms offer a carpooling service in which several passengers heading in the same direction can share a ride by being efficiently matched to an available vehicle. Examples of such services in NYC include uberPOOL, Lyft Line and Via.