Making goods evolved over several centuries from craft production to complex and highly automated manufacturing processes. A companion paper by R. Jaikumar documents the transformation of firearms manufacture through six distinct epochs, each accompanied by radical changes in the nature of work....

Many observers are dissatisfied with the current condition of privately owned electric utilities in the United States. Numerous proposals have been made for change, including suggestions to deregulate all or part of the industry.' Those who favor deregulation argue that electric power systems,...

An electrical system is modelled with a transmission network, customers, central generators, and independent generators. The system is subject to stochastic failures and stochastic demand parameters. Optimal spot prices are derived for the system. They vary stochastically with space and time,...

Rapid technological learning is critical to commercial success in VLSI semiconductor manufacturing. This learning is done through deliberate activities, especially various types of experimentation. Such experiments are vulnerable to confounding by process noise, caused by process variability....

In our prior work on product diffusions in presence of a capacity constraint, we postulated that a firm operating in such an environment should always attempt to fulfill as much of the present demand as is possible with the capacity constraint. In other words, the firm would never have demand...

We use hospital-level discharge data from cardiac patients in California to estimate the effects of focus on operational performance. We examine focus at three distinct levels of the organization--at the firm level, at the operating unit level, and at the process flow level. We find that focus...

The Bass diffusion model is a well-known parametric approach to estimating new product demand trajectory over time. This paper generalizes the Bass model by allowing for a supply constraint. In the presence of a supply constraint, potential customers who are not able to obtain the new product...

We study the demand forecast-sharing process between a buyer of customized production equipment and a set of equipment suppliers. Based on a large data collection we undertook in the semiconductor equipment supply chain, we empirically investigate the relationship between the buyer's forecasting...