We argue the importance of studying service systems in which the successful completion of job/customer service cannot be observed contemporaneously. Military and other applications are cited. The allocation of a large amount of processing to a job may make its (unobservable) successful...

A common theme in the studies of flexible supply contracts has been the producer's profit-maximization problem without regard to the suppliers' reactions. However, suppliers do react and protect their downside against producer's operating policies by revising their strategies in a manner...

In this paper we extend the deterministic model of Dechert and Brock (forthcoming) to stochastic models. First, we consider the lake game in a Brock and Mirman framework and show what happens to the Skiba point when there is uncertainty in the model. Second, we develop the model as an optimally...

Long-term observers of urban communities know that the housing quality distributions of communities and the changes of these distributions over time encompass not one but a variety of patterns. The equilibrium outcome derived from the housing market literature explains one pattern of change....

Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain R...D projects, as management can repeatedly gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. This value is now well accepted and referred to as "real...

Managing highly skilled employees is extremely complex because of the need to balance the costs and time lags associated with their training against the need to meet demand as quickly as possible. Unlike previous approaches to this problem in the staffing literature, this paper develops an...

We consider the problem of determining (for a short lifecycle) retail product initial and replenishment order quantities that minimize the cost of lost sales, back orders, and obsolete inventory. We model this problem as a two-stage stochastic dynamic program, propose a heuristic, establish...

The accelerated pace of technological change has led to rapid obsolescence of productive capacity in electronics and other industries. Managers must consider the impact of future technologies while making acquisition and replacement decisions in such environments. We consider a problem where a...