Domain-independent real-time service provisioning in digital platforms: Featuring bundling and customer time-preference

Abstract

Digital platforms have emerged as an important technology underpinning the new economy. A key problem in such platforms concerns provisioning decisions for customer-service requests, in order to maximize the provider's revenue subject to resource availability. Provisioning is important to meet customer needs, and in turn, for customer retention. The service provisioning problem, in addition to being NP-hard, is further compounded by the fact that the timeframe to make provisioning decisions is short, and more importantly, varies considerably across different platform domains. Digital-platform customers often request bundled services and are sensitive to when tasks get completed. We describe a behavioral-economic model of this problem and develop a domain-independent solution featuring a judicious combination of optimization-backed rule-based approach. Through extensive computational results, we show how our approach has the potential for generalizability and tailorability across different domains in a seamless manner, thus offering the advantages proposed in the software-reusability literature. Implications to platform sustainability, reusable platform solutions and to practical approaches to real-time platforms are also provided.