We analyze strategic relationships between buyers and sellers in markets with switching costs and dynamic uncertainty by investigating the scenario wherein a representative buyer trades with two foreign sellers located in the same foreign country. We show that, under exchange rate uncertainty,...

Motivated by the varied green product line extension strategies implemented by leading manufacturers in several industries (e.g., footwear and other apparel), we consider the price and quality optimization (i.e., product line design) problem of a monopolist selling (at most) two product...

We examine the strategic interplay between a buyer's design decision and the ensuing competition between suppliers in a three-tier closed-loop supply chain setting with significant recycling considerations. The nature of the engineering design decision in our research entails choice of integral...

We explore the supplier's and buyer's reactions to supply disruption under information asymmetry about the severity of disruption. Upon disruption, the supplier strategically quotes a due date for supply recovery and decides the completion time for recovery. Given the quoted due date, the buyer...

Motivated by interactions with a major player in the aerospace industry, we consider the relationship between a supplier of specialty material forgings and a buyer that manufactures airplane components by extensively machining down these forgings as per component design specifications. Due to...

Many online retail channels face high rates of product returns. This poses a new challenge to the sellers' dynamic pricing problem when some returns in good condition can be resold in the selling season. To study the impact of product returns and guide sellers to adjust pricing policies, we...

An important difference between both manufacturing and wholesaling vs. retail is the information available concerning inventory. Typically, far less information characterizes retail. Here, an extreme environment of information shortfall is examined. The environment is technically termed...

We study a supply planning problem in a manufacturing system with two stages. The first stage is a remanufacturer that supplies two closely-related components to the second (manufacturing) stage, which uses each component as the basis for its respective product. The used products are recovered...

Flexible robotic cells combine the capabilities of robotic flow shops with those of flexible manufacturing systems. In an m-machine flexible cell, each part visits each machine in the same order. However, the m operations can be performed in any order, and each machine can be configured to...

A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has...