We consider a generic Markov decision process (MDP) with two controls: one control taking effect immediately and the other control whose effect is delayed by a positive lead time. Computing the optimal policy of this MDP is difficult when the lead time is large. Interestingly, as the lead time...

Inventory models with lost sales and large lead times are notoriously difficult to manage due to the curse of dimensionality. Recently, Goldberg et al. (2016) and Xin and Goldberg (2016) proved that in the lost-sales inventory model with divisible products, as the lead time grows large, a simple...