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作者：Secomandi, Nicola
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：Pipelines play a critical role in matching the supply and demand of natural gas. The pricing of their capacity is an important problem in practice for pipeline companies and the users of this capacity, which include shippers such as natural gas merchants, producers, and local distribution companies. This paper conducts a normative analysis of how pipeline capacity should be priced by each of these players. Although the trading value of this capacity should be relevant to merchants and its subs...
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作者：Caro, Felipe; Martinez-de-Albeniz, Victor
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Navarra; IESE Business School
摘要：We propose an extension of the competitive newsvendor model to investigate the impact of quick response under competition. For this purpose, we consider two retailers that compete in terms of inventory: customers that face a stockout at their first-choice store will look for the product at the other store. Consequently, the total demand that each retailer faces depends on the competitor's inventory level. We allow for asymmetric reordering capabilities, and we are particularly interested in th...
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作者：Shang, Kevin H.; Zhou, Sean X.; van Houtum, Geert-Jan
作者单位：Duke University; Chinese University of Hong Kong; Eindhoven University of Technology
摘要：In some supply chains, materials are ordered periodically according to local information. This paper investigates how to improve the performance of such a supply chain. Specifically, we consider a serial inventory system in which each stage implements a local reorder interval policy; i.e., each stage orders up to a local base-stock level according to a fixed-interval schedule. A fixed cost is incurred for placing an order. Two improvement strategies are considered: (1) expanding the informatio...
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作者：Allon, Gad; Gurvich, Itai
作者单位：Northwestern University
摘要：The literature on many-server approximations provides significant simplifications toward the optimal capacity sizing of large-scale monopolists, but falls short of providing similar simplifications for a competitive setting in which each firm's decision is affected by its competitors' actions. In this paper, we introduce a framework that combines many-server heavy-traffic analysis with the notion of epsilon-Nash equilibrium and apply it to the study of equilibria in a market with multiple larg...
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作者：Armony, Mor; Gurvich, Itai
作者单位：New York University; Northwestern University
摘要：We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a prespecified service level target? We tackle these questions by characterizing control and staffing schemes that are asymptotically optimal in the limit, as the system load grows large. Our ma...
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作者：Kumar, Sunil; Randhawa, Ramandeep S.
作者单位：Stanford University; University of Southern California
摘要：We study a profit-maximizing firm providing a service to price and delay sensitive customers. We are interested in analyzing the scale economies inherent in such a system. In particular, we study how the firm's pricing and capacity decisions change as the scale, measured by the potential market for the service, increases. These decisions turn out to depend intricately on the form of the delay costs seen by the customers; we characterize these decisions up to the dominant order in the scale for...
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作者：Yin, Shuya
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Irvine
摘要：Independent parties that produce perfectly complementary components may form alliances (or coalitions or groups) to better coordinate their pricing decisions when they sell their products to downstream buyers. This paper studies how market demand conditions (i.e., the form of the demand function, demand uncertainty, and price-sensitive demand) drive coalition formation among complementary suppliers. In a deterministic demand model, we show that for an exponential or isoelastic demand function,...
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作者：Araman, Victor F.; Popescu, Ioana
作者单位：New York University; American University of Beirut; INSEAD Business School
摘要：An important challenge faced by media broadcasting companies is how to allocate limited advertising space between upfront (forward) contracts and the spot market (referred to in advertising as the scatter market) to maximize profits and meet contractual commitments. We develop stylized optimization models of airtime capacity planning and allocation across multiple clients under audience uncertainty. In a short-term profit maximizing setting, our results provide insight for capacity planning de...
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作者：Afanasyev, Maxim; Mendelson, Haim
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：We model competition between two providers who serve delay-sensitive customers. We compare a generalized delay cost structure, where a customer's delay cost depends on her service valuation, with the traditional additive delay cost structure, where the delay cost is independent of the customer's service valuation. Under the additive delay cost structure, service providers offer different prices and expected delays, but customers are indifferent between the providers. Under the generalized dela...
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作者：Aydinliyim, Tolga; Vairaktarakis, George L.
作者单位：University of Oregon; University System of Ohio; Case Western Reserve University
摘要：A set of manufacturers outsources certain operations to a single third party following the announcement of a booking price for each available day of production. Knowing these costs, manufacturers book available production days in a first-come-first-serve order to optimize their individual cost. The cost for each manufacturer consists of booking and work-in-progress costs, as expressed by the weighted flow time. When window booking is completed, the third party identifies a schedule that minimi...
