Over the past few years, firms in the travel and entertainment industries have begun using novel sales strategies for revenue management. In this chapter, we study a selling strategy called opaque selling, in which firms guarantee one of several fully specified products, but hide the identity of...

We study how consumers with waiting cost disutility choose between two congested services of unknown service value. Consumers observe an imperfect private signal indicating which service facility may provide better service value as well as the queue lengths at the service facilities before...

Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in the short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious: More discounted...

Operations of publicly traded firms differ from privately owned firms because public firms' managers make decisions based on their own interests. In this paper, we study how stock market pressure may influence a manager's inventory and operational management. Our model is a straightforward...

It is well known that scheduling jobs according to the Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT) policy is optimal for minimizing mean response time in a single-server system with online arrivals. Unfortunately, SRPT scheduling requires users to reveal their job size (service requirement), which...

Technology transfer offers global firms an opportunity to reduce the costs involved in serving emerging markets as well as to source from low-cost locations for their home markets. However, it also poses a potential risk of imitation by local competitors who may enter the market(s). We introduce...

We study how a manager's short-term interest in the firm's market value may motivate channel stuffing: shipping excess inventory to the downstream channel. Channel stuffing allows a manager to report sales in excess of demand in order to influence investors' valuation of the firm. We apply an...

A classic example that illustrates how observed customer behavior impacts other customers' decisions is the selection of a restaurant whose quality is uncertain. Customers often choose the busier restaurant, inferring that other customers in that restaurant know something that they do not. In an...