Service providers and their customers are sometimes victims of failures caused by exogenous factors such as unexpected bad weather, power outages, or labor strikes. When such no-fault failures occur in confined zones, service providers may confine customers against their will if making...

We consider multiunit Vickrey auctions for procurement in supply chain settings. This is the first paper that incorporates transportation costs into auctions in a complex supply network. We first introduce an auction mechanism that makes simultaneous production and transportation decisions so...

Almost all research in appointment scheduling has focused on the trade-off between customer waiting times and server idle times. In this paper, we present an observation-based method for estimating the relative cost of the customer waiting time, which is a critical parameter for finding the...