Large population health insurance claims databases together with operations research and data mining methods have the potential of significantly impacting health care management. In this thesis we research how claims data can be utilized in three important areas of health care and medicine and...

We present in this work a unified approach and provide the optimal solution to the pricing problem of option contracts for a supplier of an industrial good in the presence of spot trading. Specifically, our approach fully and jointly endogenizes the determination of three major characteristics...

The growth of Low Fare Carriers (LFCs) has encouraged many airlines to remove fare restrictions (such as advance purchase requirements and Saturday-night stays) on many of their fare class products, leading to the simplification of fare structures in competitive markets. In the most extreme...

(cont.) In the second part of the thesis, we focus on the design and analysis of simple, possibly non-coordinating contracts in a single-supplier, multi-retailer supply chain where retailers make both pricing and inventory decisions. Specifically, we introduce a buy-back menu contract to improve...

Investors commonly use stopping rules to help them get in and out of their investment positions. Despite their widespread use and support from behavioral finance, there has been little discussion of their impact on portfolio performance in classic portfolio choice theory. In this thesis, I...

In the past decade, we have seen significant increase in the level of outsourcing in many industries. This increase in the level of outsourcing increases the importance of implementing effective contracts in supply chains. In this thesis, we study several issues in supply chain contracts. In the...

A large online retailer strategically stocks inventory for SKUs with low demand. The motivations are to provide a wide range of selections and faster customer fulfillment service. We assume the online retailer has the technological capability to manage and control the inventory globally: all...

By combining the strengths of human and computers, Human Machine Collaborative Decision Making has been shown to generate higher quality solutions in less time than conventional computerized methods. In many cases, it is difficult to model continually changing problems and incorporate human...

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) model problems of sequential decision-making under uncertainty. They have been studied and applied extensively. Nonetheless, there are two major barriers that still hinder the applicability of MDPs to many more practical decision making problems: * The decision...

In this thesis, we focus on oligopolistic markets for a single perishable product, where firms compete by setting prices (Bertrand competition) or by allocating quantities (Cournot competition) dynamically over a finite selling horizon. The price-demand relationship is modeled as a parametric...