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...

A newsvendor game studies whether players can collaborate on inventory pooling, where the cost allocation is usually analyzed by the notion of core in cooperative game theory. It is known that the core of the newsvendor game is non-empty and one can use duality theory in stochastic programming...

We consider the economic lot-sizing (ELS) game with general concave ordering cost.In this cooperative game, multiple retailers form a coalition by placing joint orders to asingle supplier in order to reduce ordering cost. When both the inventory holding costand backlogging cost are linear...