The benefits of inventory risk pooling are well known and documented. Eppen (1979) and Corbett and Rajaram (2006) prove that the expected costs of a centralized system are increasing in the degree of (positive) dependence of demand in an idealized newsvendor setting. Using the supermodular...

In this Extended Appendix, we extend the mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) formulation as well as the heuristics derived in Mak et al. (2013) to tackle the problem of assigning and sequencing appointments for multiple servers. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the...

Managing appointments for service systems with random job durations is a challenging task. We consider a class of appointment planning problems that involve two sets of decisions: job sequencing, i.e., determining the order in which a list of jobs should be performed by the server, and...

Distributing scarce resources such as COVID-19 vaccines is often a highly time-sensitive and mission-critical operation. On top of that, most COVID-19 vaccines require two doses to be administered three or four weeks apart. How to effectively roll out two-dose vaccines is a crucial policy...