Each year the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society of INFORMS conducts a student paper competition. In Volume 2, Issue 2 of M&SOM, we published the extended abstracts of the 1999 winners in the hopes that this could become an annual event. Our hopes have become a...

Many consumers have learned to delay purchases, anticipating that prices might decrease. Such strategic or forward-looking behavior has attracted increasing attention from various disciplines, including operations management, information systems, marketing, and economics. However, there is...