Global trade is seafaring commerce: 90\% of traded goods are carried by maritime transport that has become vulnerable to security risks. This has led governments to initiate security programs serving tens of thousands of members worldwide. This paper studies the government’s incentive design...

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...

We consider a firm buying a commodity from the spot market as raw material and selling a final product by submitting bids in a continuous review environment. Bidding opportunities (i.e., demand arrivals) are random, and the likelihood of winning bids (i.e., selling the product) depends on the...