Firms have very different inventory levels. How much of this heterogeneity is due to differences among firms, versus among industries? Using all observations in COMPUSTAT for 1950 through 2004, we find that both industry and firm effects are significant. Further, firm effects are as strong as,...

The discipline of operations management is rarely studied with an eye on public policies. Yet, it is glaring to even the casual observer that public infrastructure is very different in different countries. How does public infrastructure affect private sector inventory levels? I develop as a...

Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

This paper is concerned with a periodic-review inventory system with three consecutive delivery modes (fast, medium, and slow) and demand forecast updates. At the beginning of each period, the inventory level and demand information are updated and decisions on how much to order using each of the...

This paper revisits the classical papers of Iglehart (Ref. 1) and Veinott and Wagner (Ref. 2) devoted to stochastic inventory problems with the criterion of long-run average cost minimization. We indicate some of the assumptions that are used implicitly without verification in their stationary...

This paper considers the case of partially observed demand in the context of a multi-period inventory problem with lost sales. Demand in a period is observed if it is less than the inventory level in that period and the leftover inventory is carried over to the next period. Otherwise, only the...

Maximization of wealth of its owners is the basic financial aim in management of enterprise. Inventory management must contribute to realization of this aim. The paper presents value-based inventory management model (EOQ) modification

Motivated by real-life business issues of Toyota China dealerships, we consider inventory-control models with delivery upgrades, in which the seller allocates its on-hand inventory to price and delivery-time sensitive customers. The seller has two decisions: inventory commitment and inventory...

This paper investigates the dynamic inventory model for the case when production in a period is restricted to a finite set of specified values. The model allows the production rate to be any value in the set (0, P, 2P, ..., mP), where m is a non-negative integer. It is assumed that the setup...