Problem definition: Women have been shown to prefer jobs with a better work-life balance across many fields. Given that serving as a state political representative requires a significant amount of travel between one’s home district and the state capitol, this suggests that long commute...

The authors report experiments on how players select among multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria in a coordination game. Subjects initially choose inefficient equilibria. Charging a fee to play (which makes initial equilibria money-losing) creates coordination on better equilibria. When fees are...

Online retailers often offer free shipping threshold policies: customers who purchase more than a threshold amount are not charged an additional fee for shipping. This paper provides a data-driven analytical model to (i) assess the profitability of a retailer’s current shipping threshold...

It is apparent that severe weather should hamper the productivity of work that occurs outside. But what is the effect of extreme rain, snow, heat and wind on work that occurs indoors, such as the production of automobiles? Using weekly production data from 64 automobile plants in the United...

Abstract Perishable capacity is often sold before it is used (e.g., tickets sold weeks before a sporting event) which creates the opportunity to include in the pricing mechanism a recourse strategy, i.e., allowing the firm or buyer to change ownership after an initial transaction. For example, a...

Automobile manufacturers in the U.S. supply chain exhibit significant differences in their days-of-supply of finished vehicles (average inventory divided by average daily sales rate). For example, from 1995 to 2004, Toyota consistently carried approximately 30 fewer days-of-supply than General...

Online service platforms that enable customers to connect with a large population of independent servers have been successfully developed in many sectors, including transportation, lodging, and delivery, among others. We ask a basic, yet fundamentally important, question - who should set the...