When a product's price fluctuates at a store, how should rational, cost-minimizing shoppers shop for it? Specifically, how frequently should they visit the store, and how much of the product should they buy when they get there? Would this rational shopping behavior differ across Every Day Low...

We propose a game-theoretical model of a retailer who sells a limited inventory of a product over a finite selling season by using one of two inventory display formats: display all (DA) and display one (DO). Under DA, the retailer displays all available units so that each arriving customer has...

Expanding product variety and high customer service provision are both major challenges for manufacturers to compete in the global market. In addition to many ongoing programs, such as lead-time reduction, redesigning products and processes so as to delay the point of product differentiation is...

We model a situation in which two retailers consider launching an "Advance Booking Discount" (ABD) program. In this program, customers are enticed to precommit their orders at a discount price prior to the regular selling season. However, these precommitted orders are filled during the selling...

Consider a plant that has information about the arrival schedule of its "inputs" over a planning cycle. The plant has parallel production lines for processing multiple types of products. However, changeover cost and changeover time are incurred when a line changes from processing one type of...

Tackling the steep increase in drug costs is an especially important issue among many health care providers and insurers. To entice the clinics to become more cost efficient, the U.S. federal government, as well as many HMOs, have developed various cost containment initiatives recently. However,...

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We determine the optimal ordering policy for a retailer who has two instants to order a seasonal product from a manufacturer prior to a single selling season. While the demand is uncertain, the retailer can improve the forecast by utilizing the market signals observed between the first and...

This special issue, by addressing problems surrounding marketing and operations management, depicts state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies, and insights to improve a firm's or supply chain's overall performance. Top scholars in the field address many of the ways in which companies can...

This paper presents a model of a bottleneck facility that performs two distinct types of operations: "regular" and "rework." Each job is subjected to a test after completing the regular operation at the bottleneck. If the job passes the test, then it continues its process downstream. Otherwise,...