Francis de Véricourt
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
- Using imperfect advance demand information in production-inventory systems with multiple customer classes Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 11(1, Winter): 128–143.
- Stock rationing in an M/Er/1 multi-class make-to-stock queue with backorders IIE Transactions 41(12): 1096–1109.
- Selfish drug allocation for containing an international influenza pandemic at the onset Operations Research 57(6, November-December): 1320–1332.
- Decentralized resource allocation to control an epidemic: A game theoretic approach Mathematical Biosciences 222(1, November): 1–12.
- Resource and revenue management in nonprofit operations Operations Research 57(5, September-October): 1114–1128.
- Competition for procurement contracts with service guarantees Operations Research 56(3, May-June): 562–575.
- Call center outsourcing contract analysis and choice Management Science 54(2): 354–368.
- Dimensioning large-scale membership services Operations Research 56(1, January-February): 173–187.
- On the incomplete results for the heterogeneous server problem Queueing Systems 52(3): 189–191.
- Managing response time in a call-routing problem with service failure Operations Research 53(6, November-December): 968–981.
- Demand allocation in multiple-product, multiple-facility make-to-stock systems Management Science 50(10, October): 1431–1448.
- Performance evaluation of a make-to-stock production line with a two- parameter-per-machine policy: The control point policy IIE Transactions 36(3): 221–236.
- Zero-inventory conditions for a two-part-type make-to-stock production system Queueing Systems 43(3, March): 251–266.
- Optimal stock allocation for a capacitated supply system Management Science 48(11): 1486–1501.
- Assessing the benefits of different stock-allocation policies for a make-to-stock production system Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 3(2, Spring): 105–121.
- Dynamic scheduling in a make-to-stock system: A partial characterization of optimal policies Operations Research 48(5, September-October): 811–819.
- Nonoptimality of static-priority policies in unreliable two-part-type manufacturing systems IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 45(2, February): 309–311.
- Le Pilotage des Systèmes de Production à Flux Tiré Logistique & Management: Le Pilotage des Flux II 7(1): 57–66.
Working Papers
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Resource and revenue management in nonprofit operations
ESMT No. 08-006
Published in Operations Research 57(5): 1114-1128.
Subject(s): Product & Operations Management, Keyword(s): capacity allocation, revenue management, dynamic pricing, nonprofit
Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities for the purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption vs. investment trade-off, where investment corresponds to providing capacity for revenue customers, and consumption corresponds to serving mission customers. Exemplary of this approach are the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, where profitable paying hospitals are used to subsidize care at free hospitals. We model this problem as a multi-period stochastic dynamic program. In each period, the organization must decide how much of the current assets should be invested in revenue-customer service capacity, and at what price the service should be sold. We provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal capacity and pricing decisions are of threshold type. Similar results are derived when the selling price is fixed but the banking of assets from one period to the next is allowed. We compare the performance of the optimal threshold policy with heuristics that may be more appealing to managers of nonprofit organizations, and assess the value of banking and of dynamic pricing through numerical experiments.
Published: 2008 -
Nurse-to-patient ratios in hospital staffing: A queueing perspective
ESMT No. 08-005
Subject(s): Product & Operations Management, Keyword(s): queueing system, health care, public policy, nursing, staffing, many-server limit theorems
The immediate motivation of this paper is California Bill AB 394, legislation which mandates fixed nurse-to-patient staffing ratios as a means to address the current crisis in the quality of health care delivery. Modeling medical units as closed queueing systems, we seek to determine whether or not ratio policies are effective at managing nurse workload. Our many-server asymptotic results suggest that ratio policies cannot provide consistently high service quality across medical units of different sizes. As a remedy, we recommend policies that deviate from the restrictive linear nature of ratio policies, employing the 'square root rule' commonly used to staff large service systems. Under some quality of care assumptions, our policies exhibit a type of 'super' pooling effect, in which, for large systems, the requisite workforce is significantly smaller than the nominal patient load.
Published: 2008
White Papers
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An economic assessment of the relationship between price regulation and incentives to innovate in the pharmaceutical industry
ESMT No. WP-109-03
Subject(s): Economics, Politics & Business Environment, Strategy & General Management, Management Sciences, Decision Sciences & Quantitative Methods, Health & Environment, Technology, R&D Management Keyword(s): price regulation, innovation, drug development, pharmaceutical industry, decision analysis, decision trees JEL Classification: C61, I11, I18
In this paper, we explore the possible consequences that pricing and reimbursement regulation may have on pharmaceutical innovation. We first investigate qualitatively how a pharmaceutical firm is likely to strategically respond in its R&D activities to pricing and reimbursement regulation. We then quantitatively evaluate these effects in the context of a calibrated decision-theoretic model of drug development in which a pharmaceutical firm is forward-looking and takes future pricing regulation into account in making current development decisions. Our findings indicate that, in designing optimal pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement regulation, the benefits of more affordable or cost-effective drugs must be traded against the costs of less pharmaceutical innovation, with fewer projects being developed in general and in particular in low-margin therapeutic areas and with little potential of being considered highly innovative at the time of market launch.
Published: 2009
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