Journal
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
Volume 65, Issue 8, Pages 3495-3517Publisher
INFORMS
DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3135
Keywords
peer effects; behavioral operations management; scheduling/rostering; empirical labour decisions in service operations; restaurant operations; people-centric operations; data-driven analytics
Funding
- INSEAD-Wharton Alliance
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We examine a large operational data set in a casual restaurant setting to study how coworkers' sales ability level affects other workers' sales performance. We find that waiters react nonlinearly to their coworkers' ability. In particular, when coworkers' overall sales ability is low, increasing this ability may prompt waiters to redouble both upselling and cross-selling efforts. When overall coworkers' ability is high, however, further increasing their ability may trigger waiters to reduce sales efforts. Our empirical findings imply that, to maximize sales, managers should mix waiters with heterogeneous ability levels during the same shift. Through a counterfactual analysis, we find that considering the inverted U-shaped peer effects when optimizing current waiters' schedules without changing their utilization may increase total sales by approximately 2.48% at no extra cost.
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