Many durable products with relatively short selling seasons have been using returns policies between manufacturers and retailers as the contractual protocol for quite some time. More recently, these sectors have witnessed the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) web-based used goods markets as...

We study a single-resource multi-class revenue management problem where the resource consumption for each class is random and only revealed at departure. The model is motivated by cargo revenue management problems in the airline and other shipping industries. We study how random resource...

We study an increasingly popular retail practice called pickup partnership that allows online retailers to offer an in-store pickup service by partnering with a physical store. In practice, online retailers use two policies for such partnerships: (i) paying a fixed fee for each pickup order to...

Global trade is seafaring commerce: 90\% of traded goods are carried by maritime transport that has become vulnerable to security risks. This has led governments to initiate security programs serving tens of thousands of members worldwide. This paper studies the government’s incentive design...

Retailers move products to eye-level shelves to boost their sales. However, little is known on what happens to the sales of products moved to other shelves as a result of bringing a product to the eye-level. We study how simultaneously changing the vertical locations of multiple products affects...

City dwellers often struggle with on-street parking. In most cities, once finally finding a curbside spot, drivers must pay in advance. However, drivers usually cannot accurately foresee how much parking time they need. Compared with traditional payment methods, i.e., cash and credit card...

Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and consignment inventory (CI) are supply-chain sourcing practices between a vendor and customer. VMI allows the vendor to initiate orders on behalf of the customer. This presumably benefits the vendor who can then make replenishment decisions according to her own...

The desire to decrease logistics costs has led organizations to investigate more profitable approaches to supply chain management. Three proven, yet not fully integrated, supply chain levers are distribution network optimization, shipment consolidation, and cross-docking (Brockmann 1999). The...

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. Themain players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients ofneural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to showthe characteristics of the actor loss function which is the...