RFID technology is being widely embraced in the supply chain, by manufacturers, retailers, and logistics firms. Although its advocates include retail giants like Wal-Mart, not everyone is enthusiastic about its benefits. It is not clear whether RFID is a boon or a curse to the supply chain: the...

A typical strategy for dealing with commodity surpluses is to store them for future sale; in particular, this is true of electricity. However, because electricity prices can be negative, there exists another potential strategy: To buy and dispose of electricity surpluses at negative prices. It is...

Electricity cannot yet be stored on a large scale, but technological advances leading to cheaper and more efficient industrial batteries make grid-level storage of electricity surpluses a natural choice. Because electricity prices can be negative, it is unclear how the presence of negative...

Merchant operations involves valuing and hedging the cash flows of commodity- and energy-conversion assets as real options based on stochastic models that inevitably embed model error. In this paper we quantify how empirically calibrated model errors concerning the futures term-structure affect...

We investigate the management of a merchant wind energy farm co-located with a grid-level storage facility and connected to a market through a transmission line. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with stochastic wind speed and electricity prices. Consistent with most...