There are many materials for which the quantity needed by a firm is at best indirectly related to the quantity of final product produced by that firm, such as solvents in manufacturing processes or office supplies. For any such "indirect" materials, an inescapable incentive conflict exists: The...

We develop an optimization procedure for assisting decision-makers in the allocation of resources for cleaning up a specific oil spill. The objective function is to minimize a weighted combination of spill-specific response and damage costs. Inputs to this problem include information about the...

In this paper, oil spills occurring near shore in semienclosed waterways are viewed as emergency events. A partial set covering model, similar to those developed for firehouse location analysis, is applied to the problem of locating oil spill response equipment. The model includes both...

There are many situations where policy makers would like to induce firms to make a major discrete conversion in production technology to help the environment. This paper examines how heterogeneity in the operating condition of firms' plant and equipment, which cannot be observed by policy...

Several organizations have developed ongoing crowdsourcing communities that repeatedly collect ideas for new products and services from a large, dispersed "crowd" of nonexperts (consumers) over time. Despite its promises, little is known about the nature of an individual's ideation efforts in...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. Because the unreviewed movies tend to be below average in quality, this practice provides a useful setting in which to test models of limited strategic thinking: Do moviegoers seem to realize that no review is a sign of...