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作者：Deo, Sarang; Corbett, Charles J.
作者单位：Northwestern University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：This paper is inspired by the recurring mismatch between demand and supply in the U. S. influenza vaccine market. Economic theory predicts that an oligopolistic market with unregulated but costly entry will experience excess entry and oversupply, not the undersupply observed in the market for influenza vaccine in recent years. In this paper, we examine the interaction between yield uncertainty, a key characteristic of many production processes, including that for influenza vaccine, and firms' ...
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作者：Shulman, Jeffrey D.; Coughlan, Anne T.; Savaskan, R. Canan
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Northwestern University
摘要：Product returns cost U.S. companies more than $100 billion annually. The cost and scale of returns management issues necessitate a deeper understanding of how to deal with product returns. We develop an analytical model that describes how consumer purchase and return decisions are affected by a seller's pricing and restocking fee policy. Taking into account the consumers' strategic behavior, we derive the seller's optimal policy as a function of consumer preferences, consumer uncertainty about...
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作者：Su, Xuanming
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper develops a model of consumer returns policies. In our model, consumers face valuation uncertainty and realize their valuations only after purchase. There is also aggregate demand uncertainty, captured using the conventional newsvendor model. In this environment, consumers decide whether to purchase and then whether to return the product, whereas the seller sets the price, quantity, and refund amount. Using our model, we study the impact of full returns policies (e.g., using 100% mon...
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作者：Groer, Chris; Golden, Bruce; Wasil, Edward
作者单位：University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; American University
摘要：In the small package shipping industry (as in other industries), companies try to differentiate themselves by providing high levels of customer service. This can be accomplished in several ways, including online tracking of packages, ensuring on-time delivery, and offering residential pickups. Some companies want their drivers to develop relationships with customers on a route and have the same drivers visit the same customers at roughly the same time on each day that the customers need servic...
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作者：Kostami, Vasiliki; Ward, Amy R.
作者单位：University of Southern California
摘要：Many service providers offer customers the choice of either waiting in a line or going offline and returning at a dynamically determined future time. The best-known example is the FASTPASS (R) system at Disneyland. To operate such a system, the service provider must make an upfront decision on how to allocate service capacity between the two lines. Then, during system operation, he must provide estimates of the waiting times for both lines to each arriving customer. The estimation of offline w...
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作者：Schoenmeyr, Tor; Graves, Stephen C.
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：We examine the placement of safety stocks in a supply chain for which we have an evolving demand forecast. Under assumptions about the forecasts, the demand process, and the supply chain structure, we show that safety-stock placement for such systems is effectively equivalent to the corresponding well-studied problem for systems with stationary demand bounds and base-stock policies. Hence, we can use existing algorithms to find the optimal safety stocks. We use a case study with real data to d...
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作者：Argon, Nilay Tanik; Ziya, Serhan
作者单位：University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
摘要：In many service systems, customers are not served in the order they arrive, but according to a priority scheme that ranks them with respect to their relative importance. However, it may not be an easy task to determine the importance level of customers, especially when decisions need to be made under limited information. A typical example is from health care: When triage nurses classify patients into different priority groups, they must promptly determine each patient's criticality levels with...
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作者：Besbes, Omar; Savin, Sergei
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; Columbia University
摘要：Managing shipping vessel profitability is a central problem in marine transportation. We consider two commonly used types of vessels-liners (ships whose routes are fixed in advance) and trampers (ships for which future route components are selected based on available shipping jobs)-and formulate a vessel profit maximization problem as a stochastic dynamic program. For liner vessels, the profit maximization reduces to the problem of minimizing refueling costs over a given route subject to rando...
