It has been recognized that when a durable goods manufacturer sells its output, it has an incentive to produce at a rate that will drive down the market price of the product over time. Because anticipation of declining prices makes consumers less willing to invest in owning the durable good,...

In this paper, we study a service network in which an agency is responsible for satisfying a constraint on the expected waiting and service time experienced by customers. However, the agency does not render the actual service. Instead, it serves to coordinate independently operated facilities....

This paper addresses the problem of jointly determining prices and production schedules for a set of items that are produced on the same production equipment. Under the assumptions that the production setup costs are negligible and that demand is seasonal but price dependent, we exploit the...

Manufacturers often use returns policies to encourage retailers to stock and price items more aggressively. We focus on the effect that such policies have on both a retailer's and a manufacturer's profits when the retailer must commit prior to the selling season to both a stocking quantity and a...

Many durable products cannot be used without a contingent consumable product, e.g., printers require ink, iPods require songs, razors require blades, etc. For such products, manufacturers may be able to lock in consumers by making their products incompatible with consumables that are produced by...

Lagrangean techniques have had wide application to the optimization of discrete optimization problems. Inverse optimization refers to the fact that each time a Lagrangean calculation is made for a specific problem with a given resources vector, an optimal solution is obtained for a related...

This paper presents simple approximations for networks of queues with overtime operation at some stations. This type of network is commonly encountered in several manufacturing applications. We provide bounds on the performance of the approximations for single and multiple machine stations. Our...

We study production planning problems where multiple item categories are produced simultaneously. The items have random yields and are used to satisfy the demands of many products. These products have specification requirements that overlap. An item originally targeted to satisfy the demand of...

The allocation of a specific amount of a given resource among competitive alternatives can often be modelled as a knapsack problem. This model formulation is extremely efficient because it allows convex cost representation with bounded variables to be solved without great computational efforts....

Editorial about the redesign of Management Science, in effect from the first issue of 1993.