Motivated by an application to school funding, we introduce the notion of a robust decomposable Markov decision process (MDP). A robust decomposable MDP model applies to situations where several MDPs, with the transition probabilities in each only known through an uncertainty set, are coupled...

This paper presents an inventory management policy for a retailer offering a layaway program. Layaway is a service provided by retailers that allows budget constrained consumers who have sufficiently high valuations to pay for a product in several installments rather than at once and obtain the...

In this paper, we explore the importance of accounting for climate when determining the impact of weather on product sales. Using a France-wide scanner panel dataset provided by our industry partner, we show that if climate is not accounted for, product categories may be misclassified as being...