Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs...

Machine sequencing formulations typically assume that the characteristics of the job set to be processed are given. However, in many applications, jobs can be batched in different ways. Two types of minimum flow-time sequencing problems with lot sizing are formulated. The "item-flow" formulation...

The multilocation inventory problem can be thought of naturally as an extension of the single location "newsboy" problem to multiple locations with transshipment possible between locations. Previous work has established the form of optimal policies; however, computational results have been...

Traditional scheduling models have emphasized sequencing of tasks at machines. At multiple-machine work-centers mean flow times are affected by the allocation of work to machines, as well as the batch-sizes used for processing. An efficient algorithm for computing the optimal solution for the...

In this paper, we analyze the contracting issues that arise in collaborative services, such as consulting, financial planning, and information technology outsourcing. In particular, we investigate how the choice of contract type--among fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and performance-based...

In many manufacturing problems, the total lead time taken to manufacture a product is an important consideration. Long lead times impose costs due to higher work-in-process inventory, increased uncertainty about requirements, larger safety stocks and poorer performance to due dates. Traditional...

This paper integrates the process oriented view of quality in manufacturing with the multi-attribute product positioning and customer preference models of marketing, within the context of traditional economic models of markets and competition. In manufacturing applications, "quality" is often...

In production scheduling, time performance is usually taken to be the province of sequencing models which take task processing times to be given. However, in practice, processing times can often be controlled by the choice of lot sizes which thus have a major impact on makespan, waiting times,...

In this paper, we study competition in multiechelon supply chains with an assembly structure. Firms in the supply chain are grouped into homogenous sectors (nodes) that contain identical firms with identical production capabilities that all produce exactly one undifferentiated product (that may...

We consider an infinite horizon investment-consumption problem in which the objective is to mmimize the discounted sum of the one period utilities. The one period utility function is assumed to be concave but may be unbounded. Both the state and action spaces are uncountable. If the average...