We consider a decentralized two-period supply chain in which a manufacturer produces a product and sells it through a retailer facing a price-dependent demand. We assume that the second period production cost declines linearly in the first-period production, but with a random learning rate. As...

Inventory inaccuracy is common at retailers. At many retailers, a cash register records incoming orders and outgoing sales, but not the demand or the shrinkage. The shrinkage refers to spoilage or pilferage of inventory. The demand differs from the sales in the periodic-review lost-sales...

Cooperative advertising is an important incentive offered by a manufacturer to influence retailers' promotional decisions. We analyze a retail market duopoly where one or both of competing retailers are supported by the manufacturer in their advertising costs. We model the problem as a...

We propose a new class of knapsack problems by assiuning that the sizes of the items to be put into a knapsack are known to be elements 0f a given subset S of the positive integers Z'^. The set S is treated as a parameter. We show that the family of knapsack problems obtained by varying the...

We deal with a single or parallel machine manufacturing system with convex cost of holding and backlogging and develop a new rigorous analysis to address the problem. We provide the results needed for the vanishing discount approach used for aour analysis. In particular, we show that one can go...

We consider a production-inventory planning problem with time-varying demands, convex production costs and a warehouse capacity constraint. It is solved by use of the Lagrangian form of the maximum principle. The possible existence of strong decision and forecast horizons is demonstrated. When...

The paper is concerned with the reduction of a class of stochastic optimal control problems to simpler problems by using decomposition and aggregation. Decomposition is shown to provide a good approximation when the system dynamics involve nearly decomposable matrices or variables with strong...

This paper describes a maximum principle for distributed parameter systems, i.e. systems characterized by partial differential equations. The maximum principle is applied to solve the problem of a cattle rancher who must decide the number of cattle in different age groups to be bought and sold...