Classical inventory models offer a variety of insights into the optimal way to manage inventories of individual products. However, top managers and industry analysts are often concerned with the aggregate macroscopic view of a firm's inventory rather than with the inventories of individual...

In this paper we analyze the impact of supply-side externalities existing among downstream retailers on supply chain performance. Namely, multiple retail firms face stochastic demand, purchase the product from the upstream wholesaler, and make stocking decisions that affect all other retailers...

Contracting with suppliers prone to default is an increasingly common problem in some industries, particularly automotive manufacturing. We model this phenomenon as a two-period contracting game with two identical suppliers, a single buyer, deterministic demand, and uncertain production costs....

We analyze volume flexibility--the ability to produce above/below the installed capacity for a product--under endogenous pricing in a two-product setting. We discover that the value of volume flexibility is a function of demand correlation between products, an outcome that cannot be explained by...

Each year the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society of INFORMS conducts a student paper competition. In Volume 2, Issue 2 of M&SOM, we published the extended abstracts of the 1999 winners in the hopes that this could become an annual event. Our hopes have become a...

Problem definition: Fast recovery from sourcing interruptions is a key objective for global supply chains and for business continuity professionals. In this paper, we study the impact of different supply chain strategies—supplier diversification and the use of long-term relationships—on the...

To analyze incentives for investing in the capacity to generate renewable electricity, we model the trade-off between renewable (e.g. wind) and nonrenewable (e.g. natural gas) technology. Renewable technology has a higher investment cost and yields only an intermittent supply of electricity;...

We study price competition in markets with a large number (in magnitude of hundreds or thousands) of potential competitors. We address two methodological challenges: simultaneity bias and high dimensionality. Simultaneity bias arises from joint determination of prices in competitive markets. We...

The authors study threshold discounting, or the practice of offering a discounted-price service if at least a pre-specified number of customers signal interest in it, as pioneered by Groupon. We model a capacity-constrained firm, a random-sized population of strategic customers, a desirable hot...

We empirically examine the impact of expanded product variety on demand concentration using large data sets from the movie rental industry as our test bed. We find that product variety is likely to increase demand concentration, which goes against the “Long Tail effect” theory predicting...