In this dissertation we study several key issues faced by firms while introducing new products to market. The first essay looks at product rollovers: introduction of a new product generation while phasing out the old one. We study the strategic decision of dual vs. single roll jointly with...

This dissertation develops a new methodology and associated solution tools toachieve optimal operations and maintenance strategies for wind turbines, helpingreduce operational costs and enhance the marketability of wind generation. Theintegrated framework proposed includes two optimization...

This research examines state clustering in Markov Decision processes, specifically addressing the problem referred to as Markov Decision process with restricted observations. The general problem is a special case of a Partially Observable Markov Decision process where the state space is...

In this thesis, three procurement policies (Backup Policy, Blend Policy, and Partial Order Policy) are considered and evaluated using a Discrete Time Markov Decision Process. The following factors were analyzed: retailer's demand distribution, holding cost, purchasing cost and supplier's...

Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study...

There is a growing focus on sustainability in corporate objectives. A key approach to managing and implementing sustainability is through operations management. Sustainable operations hold the key to increased profitability and effective management of environmental issues. Among the business...

Studies in newsvendor decision-making have shown that human decisions systematically deviate from analytical solutions found in many utility models of the single period problem (SPP). Yet for the most part the impacts of this human decision bias in systems of newsvendor type products have not...

This thesis studies inventory control with risk of major supply chain disruptions, specifically border closures and congestion. We first investigate an inventory system in which the probability distributions of order leadtimes are dependent on the state of an exogenous Markov process; we will...

This thesis studies three problems related to inventory control.The first problem is motivated by the need to eliminate thebullwhip effect in a supply chain. An important source of thiseffect is the inventory control policy, which is originallydesigned to smooth production in response to demand...

Uncertainty is a norm in business decisions. In this research, we focus on the inventory decisions for companies with uncertain customer demands. We first investigate forward buying strategies for single stage inventory decisions. The situation is common in commodity industry where prices often...