Purpose: Economic growth of China in the past decades has caused rapid increase in energy consumption and environmental deterioration. Therefore, it is critical to make an environmental evaluation and to help decision makers to know each province’s distance to the optimal target and improve...

Purpose The paper aims to study a strategy of advance selling with part payment (ADP) in which pre-ordering consumers are required to pay a portion of advance price first and then pay the rest in the spot period to complete the order. The authors compare the ADP strategy with strategies of...

Purpose: This paper aims to estimate the performance of the social security administration (SSA) in dealing with disability benefits applications in American. Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose a multi-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to analyze the efficiency of 167...

Purpose: Based on the traditional buyback model, this paper aims to propose a new buyback method – the variable buyback contract – to solve the serious inventory backlog in the current economic situation. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors further study the buyback...

Purpose – The purposes of this paper is to propose a customer returns model in a dual-channel supply chain where a customer can return the purchased product to the retailer or the manufacturer and obtain an equilibrium of selling prices and refund prices and the optimal profit when considering...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to establish a stylized model to solve the pricing strategy, resource allocation and consumer surplus problems of multichannel healthcare services. Design/methodology/approach: This paper considers a two-stage decision model with different levels of...

Purpose: It has always been a hot topic for online retailers to obtain consumers’ product evaluations from massive online reviews. In the process of online shopping, there is no face-to-face interaction between online retailers and customers. After collecting online reviews left by customers,...