In this paper, we analyze the contracting issues that arise in collaborative services, such as consulting, financial planning, and information technology outsourcing. In particular, we investigate how the choice of contract type--among fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and performance-based...

The scheduling of lot sizes in multistage production environments is a fundamental problem in many Material Requirements Planning Systems. Many heuristics have been suggested for this problem with varying degrees of success. Research to date on obtaining optimal solutions has been limited to...

Internal prices are used in practice to allocate central resources to a firms' profit centers. The fixed costs of capacity acquisitions are often included in these prices. We examine the interaction between capacity acquisition and competition when capacity is available in fixed increments. We...

In this paper, we quantify the efficiency of decentralized supply chains that use price-only contracts. With a price-only contract, a buyer and a seller agree only on a constant transaction price, without specifying the amount that will be transferred. It is well known that these contracts do...

In many manufacturing problems, the total lead time taken to manufacture a product is an important consideration. Long lead times impose costs due to higher work-in-process inventory, increased uncertainty about requirements, larger safety stocks and poorer performance to due dates. Traditional...

This paper integrates the process oriented view of quality in manufacturing with the multi-attribute product positioning and customer preference models of marketing, within the context of traditional economic models of markets and competition. In manufacturing applications, "quality" is often...

In production scheduling, time performance is usually taken to be the province of sequencing models which take task processing times to be given. However, in practice, processing times can often be controlled by the choice of lot sizes which thus have a major impact on makespan, waiting times,...

In this paper, we study competition in multiechelon supply chains with an assembly structure. Firms in the supply chain are grouped into homogenous sectors (nodes) that contain identical firms with identical production capabilities that all produce exactly one undifferentiated product (that may...

We consider an infinite horizon investment-consumption problem in which the objective is to mmimize the discounted sum of the one period utilities. The one period utility function is assumed to be concave but may be unbounded. Both the state and action spaces are uncountable. If the average...

Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs...