Motivated by the business practice whereby some manufacturers open their own retail stores despite the existence of more efficient independent retailers, this paper examines the distribution channel choice of competing manufacturers under demand uncertainty and resale price maintenance. We...

Early order commitment (EOC) is a strategy for supply chain coordination, wherein the retailer commits to purchasing from a manufacturer a fixed order quantity a few periods in advance of the regular delivery lead time. In this paper, we formulate and analyze the EOC strategy for a...

Lee et al. (1997) advocated the idea of sharing demand and order information among different supply chain entities to mitigate the bullwhip effect. Even with full supply chain visibility afforded by IT systems with requirements planning and with no information distortion, we identify a "core"...

We examine referral reward programs (RRP) that are intended for a service firm to encourage its current customers (inductors) to entice their friends (inductees) to purchase the firm's service. By considering the interplay among the firm, the inductor, and the inductee, we solve a "nested"...

We study the operational implications from competition in the provision of healthcare services, in the context of national public healthcare systems in Europe. Specifically, we study the potential impact of two alternative ways through which policy makers have introduced such competition: (i)...