Overbooking Policy

Overbooking Policy is the practice of accepting more reservations than capacity — traditionally studied in airline reservation by Beckmann (1958), but the modern outpatient application was formulated by LaGanga and Lawrence (2007): placing extra patients in a slot given the expected no-show probability. Decision variable is the overbooking rate (maximum patients per slot), constraints are an upper bound on waiting time + overtime spillover + a daily throughput target, and the objective is the weighted minimum of expected waiting time and doctor idle time. LaGanga and Lawrence (2007) demonstrated with real clinic data: the optimum overbooking rate depends on no-show probability, the ratio of slot duration to service time, and the cost weights; the typical gain is 8-15% in doctor productivity and 5-10% in patient access. Stochastic extension (Kim and Giachetti 2006): no-show probability is modelled variably by patient type and time of day. Caveat: aggressive overbooking raises wait time too much and patient satisfaction suffers; the wait-time contractual target should therefore enter the model as a **constraint**.