We consider a market consisting of two populations, termed rich and poor for convenience. If a product is priced such that it is very expensive for the poor, but affordable to the rich, then it becomes a status symbol for the poor and this makes it more desirable for the poor. At a lower price,...

We examine optimal control decisions regarding pricing, network size and hiring strategy in the context of open source software development. Opening the source code to a software product often implies that consumers would not pay for the software product itself. However, revenues may be...

A commonly observed two-stage pricing strategy for a custom-made product involves a prepurchase entry fee for a potential consumer and a purchase price if he decides to buy the product. We solve and compare two settings: In the first, the firm does not commit in advance to the second-stage price...

Optimal control theory is employed to derive explicitly the optimal (profit maximizing) price of a durable new product over time. The sales rate dynamics depends on the product price and on the unsold portion of the market. Specifically, the hazard rate (i.e. the probability of a purchase by a...

We are concerned with a discrete-time undiscounted dynamic lot size model in which demand and the production setup cost are constant for an initial few periods and the holding cost of inventory is an arbitrary nondecreasing function assumed to be stationary (i.e., explicitly independent of time)...

Semiconductor manufacturing performed on expensive machines requires repetitive use of several similar processing operations. Owing to economic considerations, these expensive machines are always shared among many products or a product at different stages of its manufacturing process. The...

This paper proposes a new methodology to solve partially observed inventory problems. Generally, these problems have infinitedimensional states that are conditional distribution of the inventory level. Our methodology involves linearizing the state transitions via unnormalized probabilities. It...

This paper analyzes the tradeoff between (demand) substitution costs and (production) changeover costs in a discrete-time production-inventory setting using a two-product dynamic lot-sizing model with changeover, inventory carrying, and substitution costs. We first show that the problem is...