Online Program
Session Type: Paper Session
Program Session: 1026 | Submission: 20950 | Sponsor(s): (OSCM)
Scheduled: Monday, Aug 12 2019 9:45AM - 11:15AM at Westin Copley Place Boston in Courier
 
Best Student Paper Award
Best Student Paper Award
 

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Chair: Rachna Shah, U. of Minnesota Twin Cities
OSCM: The Effect of Unstable Schedules on Employee Turnover Productivity
Author: MohammadMahdi Hashemian, MIT Sloan School of Management
Author: Zeynep Ton, MIT Sloan School of Management
Unstable schedules with varying hours week to week and inadequate average hours hurt low-wage retail employees and their families. In this paper, we examine how unstable schedules affect company performance. Using 52 weeks of data from over 1,500 stores and more than 77,000 employees of a large specialty retailer, we find that inconsistent hours and low weekly hours for associates increase employee turnover and decrease productivity both at the individual and store level.  The effect of hours on productivity, in particular, is quite significant. Having a typical employee, who works 16 hours per week instead work 26 hours per week, without changing the total hours worked at the store, can increase their sales per hour between 12% and 20%. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of a narrow focus on minimizing labor supply and demand costs. They also imply that a labor strategy with fewer employees, each getting more hours and more consistent schedules, would not only create better jobs but also help companies lower their turnover costs and improve productivity.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OSCM: Differentiating Inter-Hospital Transfer Types: Varied Impacts on LOS and Destination Choices
Author: Raymond Fan, U. of Houston
Author: Ming Zhao, U. of Houston
Author: Xiaosong Peng, U. of Houston
Inter-hospital transfer (IHT) has great impacts on patients. This study first differentiates between IHT types, namely clinical transfers and non-clinical transfers, and investigates their varying effects on hospital length of stay (LOS). Next, the study explores destination choice strategies for the two IHT types. Drawing on the well-established operations management (OM) outsourcing literature, we view IHT as a special case of supply chain outsourcing and conceptualize the two IHT types as strategic outsourcing and concurrent sourcing, respectively. Using patient level discharge data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), we develop a methodology to classify the two types of IHT. Our analysis results yield two major findings. First, non-clinical transfers are associated with longer LOS than clinical transfer, and account for the significantly longer LOS of IHT than that of direct admissions. Second, the two types of IHT has different impacts on LOS depending on the transfer destination choices. Clinical transfers within the same hospital system on average are associated with longer LOS than those to a receiving hospital outside of the sending hospital’s system. In contrast, non-clinical transfers within the same system are associated with shorter LOS than those to a receiving hospital outside of the sending hospital’s system. The results shed light on the nature and impacts of the two different IHT types, and provide practical implications on selecting transfer destinations that reduce LOS.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OSCM: The Impact of Behavioral and Economic Drivers on Gig Economy Workers
Author: Park Sinchaisri, The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania
Author: Gad Allon, Northwestern Kellogg School of Management
Author: Maxime Cohen, NYU Stern
Gig economy firms benefit from labor flexibility by hiring independent self-scheduling workers. This labor flexibility poses a great challenge in planning and committing to a service capacity. In collaboration with a ride-hailing company, we study how on-demand workers make labor decisions: when to work and for how long. We are interested not only in improving the prediction of the number of active drivers but also in understanding how to design better financial incentives. Using a large comprehensive dataset, we analyze workers’ decisions and responses to incentives while accounting for sample selection bias, simultaneity, and endogeneity. Our results reconcile competing theories of labor supply regarding the impact of income shocks on labor decisions. We find that financial incentives have a significant positive influence on the decision to work and on the number of work hours. This finding confirms the positive income elasticity from the neoclassical theory of labor supply. We also find support for a behavioral theory as workers exhibit income targeting (they work less when they get closer to their earning goal) and inertia (they work more when they have worked for longer). We finally show via numerical experiments that our approach can increase service capacity by 25% without incurring additional cost, or maintain the same capacity at a 27.69% lower cost.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OSCM: The Unintended Consequences of Health Policy: An Empirical Analysis of Opioid Prescribing Behavior
Author: Justin Kistler, U. of South Carolina
Author: Luv Sharma, -
The Value Based Purchasing program was designed to incentivize healthcare organizations and providers to improve the safety and quality of patient care. While considerable improvement has been made in a number of performance domains, our empirical analysis of opioid prescription rates over a seven-year period indicates an unintended increase in opioid prescribing immediately following the implementation of the VBP program. Our findings also indicate the moderating impact of prescriber workload and specialty training on opioid prescription rates.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
  
KEY TO SYMBOLS Teaching-oriented Teaching-oriented   Practice-oriented Practice-oriented   International-oriented International-oriented   Theme-oriented Theme-oriented   Research-oriented Research-oriented   Teaching-oriented Diversity-oriented
Selected as a Best Paper Selected as a Best Paper