The term platform economy refers to a business practice in which online retailers serve as transaction platforms that connect upstream suppliers with downstream buyers. Each transaction platform has a traditional retail channel where a supplier can sell products indirectly to customers. In...

Managing product availability in a cost effective way has always been a major challenge faced by inventory managers. We study the problem of a firm selling a perishable product with short-term demand patterns and a long-term service target using the newsvendor framework. The newsvendor...

This paper considers an optimal control problem for the dynamics of the Nerlove-­Arrow advertising model, the optimal control being the rate of advertising expenditure required to maximize the present value of net profit streams (or, sales) over a finite horizon subject to a budget constraint....

Several nonlinear stochastic models are developed for a dynamic profit-maximizing firm with respect to its price and (possibly) advertising decisions under threat of entry. The optimal price ­advertising policies for these models are characterized by the use of the Maximum Principle. While the...

With the boom of e-commerce, express delivery has been increasingly regarded as a bottleneck and key factor for achieving success. Additionally, whether to include such express delivery service or not is an important yet outstandingly unsolved problem for online retailers. In this regard, this...

Managing customer satisfaction in a cost effective way has always been a major challenge faced by inventory managers. We study the problem of a newsvendor selling a perishable product with short-term demand patterns and a long-term service target. The newsvendor determines his long-term order at...

We study a firm's sourcing strategy when facing two unreliable suppliers and a price-dependent isoelastic demand. At optimality, the firm always orders at least from the low-cost supplier. The firm also orders from the high-cost supplier if and only if the effective purchase cost from the...

This paper investigates a decentralized assembly system that consists of one manufacturer and multiple suppliers who produce the complementary components. In a single selling season, the manufacturer initially sets a vendor inventory liability period (VILP) to control the suppliers' delivery...

We analyze a price-setting news-vendor problem with an additive – multiplicative demand. We show that the uni-modality of the news-vendor profit function holds when the underlying random term has an increasing failure rate and the demand functions satisfy certain concavity conditions....