The purpose of this study is to test empirically for the first time the general hypothesis that inventory to sales ratios have decreased over time in the German economy. Although inventory reduction has been a prevalent topic in the production and operations management literature, there is a...

Companies, especially those in e-business, are increasingly offering free shipping to buyers whose order sizes exceed the free shipping quantity. In this paper, given that the supplier offers free shipping, we determine the retailer’s optimal order lot size and the optimal retail price. We...

In this paper we study a firm’s disposition decision for returned end-of-use products, which can either be remanufactured and sold, or dismantled into parts that can be reused. We formulate this problem as a multi-period stochastic dynamic program, and find the structure of the optimal policy,...

We consider a supply chain in which two suppliers compete for supply to a customer. Pricing and delivery-frequency decisions in the system are analyzed by two three-stage noncooperative games with different decision rights designated to the parties involved. The customer first sets the price (or...

A model that combines an inventory and location decision is presented, analyzed and solved. In particular, we consider a single distribution center location that serves a finite number of sales outlets for a perishable product. The total cost to be minimized, consists of the transportation costs...

In practice, in order to reduce default risks with credit-risk customers, a seller (e.g., a manufacturer or a retailer) frequently requests its credit-risk customers to pay a fraction of the purchase amount at the time of placing an order as collateral deposit, and then grants a permissible...

A model that combines an inventory and location decision is presented, analyzed and solved. In particular, we consider a single distribution center location that serves a finite number of sales outlets for a perishable product. The total cost to be minimized, consists of the transportation costs...