Achal Bassamboo

About

Achal Bassamboo is the Charles E. Morrison Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and serves as the co-director of the MMM program, a dual degree between Kellogg and the Segal Design at McCormick School. He joined the Kellogg faculty in 2005 after completing his Ph.D. in Operations, Information, and Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research interests include service systems, revenue management, and information sharing, with current work focusing on designing flexible service systems, capacity planning under parameter uncertainty, and studying the credibility of information provided by service providers or retailers. Professor Bassamboo has published articles in leading journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Operations Research. He has received recognition for his research, including the 2016 Young Scholar Award from the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society, and has served on editorial boards for prominent journals including Management Science, POMS, and Naval Research Logistics. He teaches courses on operations management, supply chain logistics, decision models, and statistics, and his academic background includes a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a master's in Statistics from Stanford, and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Marketing
• Business
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Industrial organization
• Telecommunications
• Operations management
• Operations research
• Computer network

Selected publications

• The Effects of Menu Costs on Retail Performance: Evidence from Adoption of the Electronic Shelf Label Technology

  Management Science · 2020 · 49 citations

  We use the adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) by an international grocery retailer in 2015 to identify the effects of physical menu costs (i.e., labor and material costs of price adjustment) on retail performance. We find that the installation of ESLs increased gross margins substantially, which implies profit gains that go far beyond labor cost savings. We also explore the mechanism behind this effect. We find that the lift in gross margins was associated with an increase in quantity so…

  PublisherDOI

• The Reference Effect of Delay Announcements: A Field Experiment

  Management Science · 2021 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We explore whether customers are loss averse in time and how delay information may impact such reference-dependent behavior using observational and field experiment data from two call centers of an Israeli bank. We consider settings with no announcements and announcements of different accuracy levels. We face two key challenges: (1) we do not observe the reference points customers use in our data, as any other field studies, and (2) it is difficult to separate the reference-dependent behavior fr…

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Customer Retrials in Call Centers: Preferences for Service Quality and Service Speed

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2021 · 28 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Problem definition: Customers are likely to initiate retrial calls when their previous contact with a call center fails to deliver a satisfactory resolution. According to industry reports, retrials are listed as a top annoying issue for customers and hurt call centers’ profits. Though recognizing this problem, call centers find it challenging to reduce retrials without overshooting their operating expenses. Our research aims to empirically understand the mechanism of customer retrials and then p…

  PublisherDOI

• A General Framework to Compare Announcement Accuracy: Static vs. LES-Based Announcement

  Management Science · 2020-10-06 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Service providers often share delay information, in the form of delay announcements, with their customers. In practice, simple delay announcements, such as average waiting times or a weighted average of previously delayed customers, are often used. Our goal in this paper is to gain insight into when such announcements perform well. Specifically, we compare the accuracies of two announcements: (i) a static announcement that does not exploit real-time information about the state of the system and…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimally Scheduling Heterogeneous Impatient Customers

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2023-02-07 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Problem definition: We study scheduling multi-class impatient customers in parallel server queueing systems. At the time of arrival, customers are identified as being one of many classes, and the class represents the service and patience time distributions as well as cost characteristics. From the system’s perspective, customers of the same class at time of arrival get differentiated on their residual patience time as they wait in queue. We leverage this property and propose two novel and easy-t…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gad Allon

  University of Pennsylvania

  30 shared

• Ramandeep S. Randhawa

  University of Southern California

  20 shared

• Assaf Zeevi

  Columbia University

  17 shared

• Chenguang Wu

  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  13 shared

• Sandeep Juneja

  TB Alliance

  11 shared

• Sunil Chopra

  Northwestern University

  10 shared

• Mark S. Daskin

  7 shared

• Ioannis Stamatopoulos

  The University of Texas at Austin

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• 2016 "Young Scholar Award" by the Manufacturing and Service…

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