We model a supply chain with two retail warehouses that place replenishment orders with a common manufacturing capacity. The two retailers differ in the variability of their order-streams. The order-stream from one retail warehouse is modeled as a Poisson process and from the other as a...

This paper develops and analyzes a principal-agent model for product specification and production motivated by Ücore buyingÝ decisions at an automobile manufacturer. The model focuses on two important elements of the ÜcoreÝ buyer's responsibility: (1) assessing the supplier's capability, and...

In this paper, we analyze demand postponement as a strategy to handle potential demand surges. Under demand postponement, a fraction of the demands from the "regular" period are postponed and satisfied during a "postponement" period. This permits capacity to be procured to satisfy the postponed...

A guaranteed time distribution system is organized so that movement of items between any source-destination pair (serviced by the system) is completed within a guaranteed period of time (T). Various express mail services are examples of such distribution systems. The movement of items between...

We model two separate, decentralized systems, each consisting of a warehouse and a production capacity. The demand processes experienced by the systems have different variabilities. The two decentralized systems consider an agreement to pool their production capacities. We examine the impact of...

The traditional or textbook approach for finding an (s, S) inventory policy is to take a demand distribution as given and then find a reorder point s and order up to point S that are optimal for this demand distribution. In reality, the demand distribution may have been obtained by fitting it to...