This paper focuses on a firm selling a make-to-stock product with a constant customer demand rate. The firm follows an exact (Q, r ) policy for raw material inventory control and faces a random eplenishment lead time. Through this research, we wish to gain a better understanding of the impact of...

In this paper, we model an operating system consisting of a firm and its customers, where the mean demand rate is a function of the guaranteed delivery time offered to the customers and of market price, where price itself is determined by the length of the delivery time. Economies of scale are...

How should a video rental chain replenish its stock of newmovies over time? Any such policy should consist of two key dimensions: (i) the number of copies purchased; and (ii) when to remove amovie from the front shelves and replace it by a newly released one.We first analyze this bi-variate...

Capacity choice or expansion, whether organic or via mergers and acquisitions, creates firms of widely varying scales. The ex-post profitability of such a transformed firm relative to its original size will typically be evaluated on ratio (rate) measures like earnings per share or profits to...

Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and consignment inventory (CI) are supply-chain sourcing practices between a vendor and customer. VMI allows the vendor to initiate orders on behalf of the customer. This presumably benefits the vendor who can then make replenishment decisions according to her own...

Firms such as Wal-Mart and Campbell's Soup have successfully implemented vendor managed inventory (VMI). Articles in the trade press and academic literature often begin with the premise that VMI is ‘beneficial'; but beneficial to which party and under what conditions? We consider in this paper...