Supply chains today routinely use third parties for many strategic activities, such as manufacturing, R&D, or software development. These activities often include relationship-specific investment on the part of the vendor, while final outcomes can be uncertain. Therefore, writing complete...

This study investigates the strategic effect of return policies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which a manufacturer can sell products directly to end customers and indirectly via an independent retailer. The manufacturer decides whether to implement a return policy in either the direct or...

Channel sharing is an important marketing strategy for giant retailers who sell their own store brands and resell national brands for cooperative manufacturers simultaneously. To expand their market and increase profitability, national brand manufacturers may consider entering the online market...

A nearly explicit feedback Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium is obtained in a dynamic distribution channel consisting of a manufacturer and two competing asymmetric retailers engaged in promoting the manufacturer's product to be sold through the retailers. The manufacturer decides on its support for...

In this paper we characterize the feedback equilibrium of a general infinite-horizon Stackelberg-Nash differential game where the roles of the players are mixed. By mixed we mean that one player is a leader on some decisions and a follower on other decisions. We prove a verification theorem that...

This paper describes a modelling methodology for multivariate stochastic processes. The concept of multiple causality is discussed and a procedure to detect multiple causality is suggested. The data of a major Canadian supermarket is analyzed and a multivariate autoregressive model for this...

Ever since the publication of Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, the number of its applications to management science problems has been steadily growing. This paper is an up-to-date survey of the applications of the deterministic maximum principle to the three functional areas of management:...

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 model of new-product adoption is proposed that incorporates price and advertising effects. An optimal control problem that uses the model as its dynamics is solved explicitly to obtain the optimal price and advertising effort over time. The model has a great potential to be used in obtaining...