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...

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 develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitiveimplications of personalized pricing (PP), whereby firms chargedifferent prices to different consumers based on their willingness topay. We embed PP in a model of vertical product differentiation and showhow it affects firms’...

In many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either byindependent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve asdigitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directingconsumer traffic to downstream retailers in a distribution network. Thisreshapes the extended...

We study a generalized Hotelling duopoly in which a consumer's net utility from a product depends on the location of product and consumer in product attribute space, a random utility term that captures idiosyncratic preferences, and the price of the product. Our model allows us to vary the...

We model competition between risk-neutral principals who hire weakly risk-averse agents to produce a good of variable quality. The agent can increase the likelihood of producing a high-quality good by providing costly effort. We demonstrate that, when the agent is strictly risk-averse, the cost...

This thesis consists of three essays, discussing three different but connected problems on decision making under uncertainty in electricpower systems.The first essay uses a system model to examine how various factors affect the market price of electricity, and decomposes the price...

Since 1990 many countries have started a deregulation process in the electricity wholesale market with a view to gaining in efficiency, lowering prices and encouraging investments. In most of the markets these objectives have been accomplished, but at the same time, prices have shown high...