The boom of e-commerce in the globe in recent years has expedited the expansion of fulfillment infrastructures by e-retailers. While e-retailers are building more warehouses to offer faster delivery service than ever, the associated fulfillment costs have skyrocketed over the past decade. In...

We provide the first approximation algorithm for dynamic newsvendor networks with stochastic demand and backlogging. Specifically, under a mild cost condition we prove the cost of a base-stock policy is less than 1.618 times the cost of an optimal policy. This answers an open question of Van...

Network design problems, such as flexibility design, are ubiquitous in modern marketplaces where firms constantly innovate new ways to match supply and demand. We develop a primal-dual based approach to analyze the flexibility design problem, i.e., allocating subsets of limited resources to each...

Problem definition: Fulfillment flexibility, the ability of distribution centers (DCs) to fulfill demand originating from other DCs, can help e-retailers reduce lost sales and improve service quality. As the cost of full flexibility is prohibitive, we seek to understand the value of partially...

We consider ad-supported media platforms with incomplete information about the disutility consumers experience from exposure to advertising. We characterize the platform's optimal menu of subscription prices and advertising quantities in monopoly and competitive settings, revealing insights on...

We study assemble-to-order (ATO) problems from the literature. ATO problems with general structure and integrality constraints are well known to be difficult to solve, and we provide new insight into these issues by establishing worst case approximation guarantees through primal-dual analyses...

We review the recent academic literature on Assemble-to-Order (ATO) systems, which stock inventory of components that are then assembled into final products upon receipt of customer demand. The key feature of such systems, component commonality (i.e., products may share common components),...

We study newsvendor network (NN) models for managing inventory in multi-resource, multi-product systems that involve both common resource requirements and fulfillment flexibility. Such systems arise in a wide range of applications, including production and e-commerce, but optimizing their...

The macro-economic and micro-economic evidences makes a persuasive case for cities as important centers for productive efficiency, innnovation, and economic growth. For cities to achieve their full economic potential, however, complementary public services are required. This paper reviews the...