Technology innovations continue to be one of the greatest drivers of economic growth. Realizing the value of such innovations, however, requires substantial follow-on investments in development and commercialization. The value of these investments is difficult to capture because of uncertain...

We provide a strategic rationale for growth options under uncertainty and imperfect competition. In a market with strategic competition, investment confers a greater capability to take advantage of future growth opportunities. This strategic advantage leads to the capture of a greater share of...

We address the value of quick response production practices when selling to a forward-looking consumer population with uncertain, heterogeneous valuations for a product. Consumers have the option of purchasing the product early, before its value has been learned, or delaying the purchase...

The bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand variability along a supply chain: a company bullwhips if it purchases from suppliers more variably than it sells to customers. Such bullwhips (amplifications of demand variability) can lead to mismatches between demand and production and hence...

Flexible capacity has been shown to be very effective to hedge against forecast errors at the investment stage. In a make-to-order environment, this flexibility can also be used to hedge against variability in customer orders in the short term. For that purpose, production levels must be...

The existence of uncertainty influences the investment, production and pricing decision of firms. Therefore, capacity expansion models need to take into account uncertainty. This uncertainty, may arise because of errors in the specification, statistical estimation of relationships and in the...

This paper considers a firm's price and inventory policy when it faces uncertain demand that depends on both price and inventory level. The authors extend the classic newsvendor model by assuming that expected utility maximizing consumers choose between visiting the firm and consuming an...

This article presents a comparative analysis of possible postponement strategies in a two-stage decision model where firms make three decisions: capacity investment, production (inventory) quantity, and price. Typically, investments are made while the demand curve is uncertain. The strategies...

Web-based group-buying mechanisms are being widely used for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. We survey currently operational online group-buying markets, and then study this phenomenon using analytical models. We build on the literatures in information...

Firms often have to make their production decisions under conditions of demand uncertainty. This is especially true for product categories such as automobiles and technology goods where the lead time needed for manufacturing forces firms to make production decisions well in advance of the...