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...

This article investigates the role of option contracts in a supply chain when the demand curve is downward sloping. We consider call (put) options that provide the retailer with the right to reorder (return) goods at a fixed price. We show that the introduction of option contracts causes the...

This article values option contracts based on the average price realized over a finite time horizon. Such contracts are of importance to traders who periodically transact in spot markets and who require protection from adverse moves in their total accrued costs realized over their trading...

A model that recognizes the advantages of coordinated group maintenance planning is established. The maintenance policy that is investigated calls for group maintenance to be conducted at time T or upon m failures, whichever comes first. This policy combines the best features of the well-known...

Merton, Perrakis and Ryan, Levy, and Ritchken have established option pricing bounds under first and second stochastic dominance preferences. These bounds are particularly important for valuing contingent claims when continuous trading in the claim and/or underlying security does not exist. This...

Contingent claims whose values depend on multiple sources of uncertainty arise in many financial contracts and in the analysis of real projects. Unfortunately closed form solutions for these options are rare and numerical methods can be computationally expensive. This article extends the...