
This paper examines prioritization in a service system and analyzes whether, in the presence of heterogeneous customers who have different needs and a costly sorting process, it pays to prioritize. In particular, in our model, sorting is costly because the task of gathering information to prioritize jobs consumes resources. We investigate a stylized model in which there are two classes of jobs - one whose waiting cost is high, called urgent, and the other whose waiting cost is low, called non-urgent. There are two types of employees, sorters, who collect information on a job and then decide whether it is urgent or non-urgent, and processors, who execute the job or provide the service. We begin by assuming that sorters categorize customers perfectly, and we relax this assumption later in the paper. We optimize two performance metrics, waiting costs (under a given budget) and total costs, and find the conditions under which prioritization is beneficial for these two metrics.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 17 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
