Consider a dominated manufacturer ("Manu") supplying a dominant retailer ("Reta"). Manu knows the product's unit manufacturing cost (m) deterministically, whereas Reta knows it only in the form of an a priori subjective distribution . Reta may implement any one of four contract formats:...

Many university placement offices employ a bidding system to allocate on-campus recruiter interview slots to students. Typically, a student is given (say) 700 points each week to bid on the firms visiting that week. Interview slots for each firm are assigned beginning with the highest bidder...

This paper presents a computational alternative to simulation for a large class of stochastic management models involving functions of random variables. An example of a model in this class is the well-known "risk analysis" problem studied by Hertz and Hillier. Our computational approach includes...

PERT-type subjective estimations are used in many stochastic decision models to estimate the random variables' mean and standard deviation (s.d.). The approach is based on the beta-distribution assumption; also, most PERT-type formulas use only three estimated fractiles. We point out that: (i)...

This paper considers various rules for scheduling appointments for medical clinic outpatients and investigates their ability to minimize a weighted sum of medical personnel's and patients' idle-time costs. It is shown that the idle times incurred by any given rule are affected by the following...