The catalog industry is a large and important industry in the US economy. One of the most important and challenging business decisions in the industry is to decide who should receive catalogs, due to the significant mailing cost and the low response rate. The problem is a dynamic one - when a...

This thesis studies two operations management topics in online auctions, and is divided into two parts. Motivated by the increasing use of ShopBots to scan Internet auctions, the first part of the thesis analytically examines whether or not two competing auctioneers selling the same commodity...

Traditional inventory models focus on effective replenishment strategies and typically assume that a commodity's price is exogenously determined. In recent years, however, a number of industries have used innovative pricing strategies to manage their inventory effectively. These developments...

This thesis revisits the portfolio selection problem in cases where returns cannot be modeled as Gaussian. The emphasis is on the development of financially intuitive and statistically sound approaches to portfolio risk minimization. When returns exhibit asymmetry, we propose using a...

Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-39).