The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is concerned with finding efficient routes for a fleet of vehicles/buses to pick up employees from pre-determined bus stops and bring them to the work place. We believe that the VRP will increase in importance as the fuel prices rise and as the extent to which...

In this paper, we examine a supply chain in which a single supplier sells to a downstream newsvendor-type retailer. We make two assumptions that enrich this simple and well-understood model. First, we consider a multi-period model, in which the sequence of events is as follows. In a period, t,...

This paper explores when it is important for firms to consider stockout-based substitution and competitor's inventory levels in making inventory decisions in the context of a duopoly model. To address this question, we consider a model where two newsvendors sell substitutable products in a...

In this paper, we examine the nature of optimal inventory policies in a system where a retailer manages substitutable products. We first consider a system with two products 1 and 2 whose total demand is D and individual demands are negatively correlated. A fixed proportion of the unsatisfied...

In this paper, we study dynamic supplier alliances in a decentralized assembly system. We examine a supply chain where n suppliers sell complementary components to a downstream assembler, who faces a price-sensitive deterministic demand. We analyze alliance/coalition formation between suppliers,...

We explore the phenomena of game companies offering to pay users in "virtual" benefits to take actions in-game that earn the game company revenue from third parties. Examples of such "incentivized actions" include paying users in "gold coins" to watch video advertising and speeding in-game...

Emergency department (ED) physicians treat patients with different symptoms and constantly switch between tasks. Using a comprehensive data set with over 650,000 patient visits to four EDs, we investigate the impact of task switching on physician productivity, quality of care, patient routing,...

This paper surveys some applications of cooperative game theory to supply chain management. Special emphasis is placed on two important aspects of cooperative games: profit allocation and stability. The paper first describes the construction of the set of feasible outcomes in commonly seen...

Behavioral studies have consistently reported the pull-to-center (PTC) effect observed in laboratory studies of the newsvendor problem. We examine whether this and some other observed effects can be reconciled under the general framework of prospect theory without special assumption on reference...

Stable alliance structures among monopoly component-suppliers in a decentralized assembly system are somewhat well understood. However, when there are competing suppliers for any particular component, less is known about such alliances. The intent of this paper is to address some of the...