This paper investigates how the structure of a relegation-promotion system impacts the competitiveness of a sports league. It proposes a rigorous mathematical model of a multi-division hierarchical sports league made up of teams with intrinsic skill levels (ISLs) that change from year to year....

We consider a price-setting newsvendor problem with partial information. The newsvendor does not know the price-dependent probability distribution of demand, but is able to estimate lower and upper limits of the market size and consumer willingness-to-pay. The objective is to minimize the...

This paper investigates the relationship between market conditions and the value and use of sourcing flexibility for service processes. We develop and analyze a series of models, and we derive expressions for the optimal switching decision, the value of the option to outsource, the value of the...

It is common in practice that retailers liquidate unsold perishable goods via clearance pricing. Markdown money is frequently used between manufacturers and retailers in such a supply chain setting. It is a form of rebate from a manufacturer to subsidize a retailer's clearance pricing after the...

We model a risk-averse newsvendor's decision-making behavior with some commonly used classes of utility functions within the expected utility theory (EUT) framework. Under fairly general conditions of EUT, we show that a risk-averse newsvendor will order less than an arbitrarily small quantity...

Newsvendor models are widely used in the literature, and usually based upon the assumption of risk neutrality. This paper uses loss aversion to model manager's decision-making behavior in the single-period newsvendor problem. We find that if shortage cost is not negligible, then a loss-averse...