In this paper we study a firm’s disposition decision for returned end-of-use products, which can either be remanufactured and sold, or dismantled into parts that can be reused. We formulate this problem as a multi-period stochastic dynamic program, and find the structure of the optimal policy,...

Upselling is offering an additional product to a customer who just made a purchase. Most catalogers and online sellers, in addition to some traditional retailers, use upselling often to clear inventories of slow-moving items. We investigate the pricing and discounting questions for such an item,...

Multi-stage decision processes are considered, in notation which is an outgrowth of that introduced by Denardo [Denardo, E. 1967. Contraction mappings in the theory underlying dynamic programming. SIAM Rev. 9 165-177.]. Certain Markov decision processes, stochastic games, and risk-sensitive...

Models in which process quality and lot sizing interact have recently been developed. Lot sizes should be reduced to compensate for poor quality if no effective inspection is possible. This note introduces an inspection delay time, measured in units produced after an inspection is made until...

This paper is motivated by the observation that the Japanese have devoted much time and energy to decreasing setup costs in their manufacturing processes and that there has been little in the way of a formal framework available to use to think about such efforts. The object of this paper is to...

This note considers the single product, single echelon, periodic review, stochastic, dynamic inventory model discussed recently [Porteus, E. L. 1971. On the optimality of generalized (s, S) policies. Management Sci. 17 411-426.], where the ordering cost function is concave increasing, rather...