B. Mandelbrot and E. Fama in the sixties, and W. Ziemba in the seventies, suggested stable laws for modeling stock returns and commodity prices. Geometric stable distributions, with Laplace distribution playing the role of a "normal" law, have been found to give better fit to such data. We study...

Consider a central depot (or plant) which supplies several locations experiencing random demands. Orders are placed (or production is initiated) periodically by the depot. The order arrives after a fixed lead time, and is then allocated among the several locations. (The depot itself does not...

The paper deals with a nonconvex, bivariate minimization problem arising in a heuristic inventory model of Hadley and Whitin (Hadley, G., T. M. Whitin. 1963. Analysis of Inventory Systems. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ.). An approach is suggested whereby the existence and uniqueness...

A common objective of social science and business research is the modeling of the relationship between demographic/psychographic characteristics of individuals and the likelihood of certain behaviors for these same individuals. Frequently, data on actual behavior are unavailable; rather, one has...

The fill rate (the proportion of demand that is satisfied from stock) is a viable alternative in inventory models to the hard-to-quantify penalty cost. However, a number of difficulties have impeded its implementation, among them that the existing cycle-based approximate solutions do not reflect...

We argue that standard approximations for two often-used inventory service-level measures may perform poorly in many situations. Then we confirm the long-standing conjecture that the (relatively) exact formulas for these quantities are convex functions of the relevant control variables. Both...

In multi-echelon repairable inventory systems with high set-up cost for order and/or high demand rates, the use of batch ordering may be more cost-effective than the common (S - 1, S) ordering policy. This paper addresses the issue of determining the optimal order batch size and stocking levels...

We study a basic continuous-time single-item inventory model where demands form a compound Poisson process and leadtimes are stochastic. The performance measure of interest is the long-run average cost. Order costs are linear, so a base-stock policy is optimal. We focus on the behavior of the...

This paper has two purposes. The first is purely expository: to introduce stochastic interest-rate models and security-evaluation methods in a simple mathematical setting. Specifically, we assume the uncertainties in the model are represented by a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain....

Consider the problem of minimizing the required number of work stations on an assembly line for a given cycle time when the processing times are independent, normally distributed random variables. The assignment of tasks to stations is subject to precedence conditions, caused by technological...