Upselling is offering an additional product to a customer who just made a purchase. Most catalogers and online sellers, in addition to some traditional retailers, use upselling often to clear inventories of slow-moving items. We investigate the pricing and discounting questions for such an item,...

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,...

Concurrent design can reduce the time required to develop new products and redesign old ones. In contrast to the conventional approach, in which the product design is (nearly) completed before it is "thrown over the wall" to the process design group, concurrent design for manufacturability, as...

Retailers are frequently uncertain about the underlying demand distribution of a new product. When taking the empirical Bayesian approach of Scarf (1959), they simultaneously stock the product over time and learn about the distribution. Assuming that unmet demand is lost and unobserved, this...

This paper addresses the horizontal coordination between production units located in different countries within a supply chain in a changing environment. The model incorporates (1) congestion and delay through uncertainties in demand and processing times, (2) a changing production cost...

The finite horizon cash balance problem with charges levied against the cash balance is considered. Conditions, sufficient to show that a two-sided (s, S) policy is optimal, are given. We consider transactions cost functions which include no fixed costs, and are linear in the amount of change....

Stereotypically, marketing is mainly concerned about satisfying customers and manufacturing is mainly interested in factory efficiency. Using the principal-agent (agency) paradigm, which assumes that the marketing and manufacturing managers of the firm will act in their self-interest, we seek...

New bounds are obtained on the optimal return function for what are called discounted sequential decision processes. Such processes are equivalent to ones satisfying the contraction and monotonicity properties (Denardo [Denardo, E. V., 1967. Contraction mappings in the theory underlying dynamic...

This paper shows that the widely appearing "marginal cost" formulations of the dynamic, periodic review, stochastic cash balance problem are equivalent to a "total cost" formulation, as long as the holding, shortage cost, and "closing of account" functions are constructed correctly.