This paper examines a grocery retailer’s management of a premade food product. The retailer’s goal is to maximize a weighted sum of direct profit and customer welfare. Multiple items of the product are produced in batches and displayed for sale. Considering that each item’s quality...

M&SOM has published papers of importance for poverty alleviation. Yet, rich opportunities for impactful research remain as yet untapped. OM insights suggest business model innovations that alleviate poverty by simultaneously empowering women, protecting natural systems or mitigating pollution,...

A buying firm might in future incur costs associated with a supplier’s CO2 emissions, safety violations or other social or environmental impacts. Learning about a supplier’s impacts requires costly effort, but is necessary (and sometimes sufficient) to reduce those impacts. The capital...

This paper contributes to a recent thrust in the OM literature on how various sorts of transparency influence social and environmental responsibility in a supply chain. In practice, companies are under pressure to publish their supplier lists and suppliers' violations, and some are beginning to...

Consider a production system which rapidly assembles many different products from inventories of modular components. Customer orders for each product arrive according to a renewal process with known rate and variance. Orders are lost if not filled within the product-specific target leadtime....