We consider a firm that designs a new product and wishes to bring it to market but does not have ownership or control over all of the resources required to make that happen. The firm must select and contract with one of several possible tier 1 suppliers for necessary inputs, who do the same with...

This paper considers single-item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale. Bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that behave myopically up to a specified stopping time. The...

The majority of papers on stochastic inventory theory make the assumption that the distribution of consumer demand in each time period is known with certainty. While this assumption is unsupported in many applied contexts, it is conventionally held that more realistic models are more difficult...

In some mechanism design problems, finite-type spaces may be natural ones to consider, yet the current literature is dominated by analyses of continuous-type spaces. This probably derives from the intellectual dominance of the early work in this area. Here we present an analysis of the...

A large midwestern hospital is expecting an increase in surgical caseload. New operating room (OR) capacity can be had by building new ORs or extending the working hours in the current ORs. The choice among these options is complicated by the fact that patients, surgeons and surgical staff, and...

What lines of communication among members of an organization are most productive in the early, ideation phase of innovation? We investigate this question with a recombination and selection model of knowledge transfer operating through a social network. We find that ideation is accelerated when...

We argue that contracts establish the norms of a relationship and that individuals incur disutility when deviating from these norms. In a laboratory experiment, we allow agents to make simple contracts before they play one of four games, and the most effective contract always includes an...