Acceptance sampling is often used to monitor the quality of raw materials and components when product testing is destructive, time-consuming, or expensive. In this paper we consider the effect of a buyer-imposed acceptance sampling policy on the optimal batch size and optimal quality level...

Firms often use acceptance sampling to monitor the quality of the raw materials and components delivered by suppliers. In this paper, we use numerical methods to examine how a risk averse supplier produces and delivers a quality level that maximizes the supplier's expected utility. We examine...

Do firms respond to cost shocks by reducing the quality of their products? Using microdata from a large Russian retailer that refreshes its product line twice-yearly, we document that higher quality products are more profitable than lower quality ones, but that the number of high quality...

In a complex and dynamic business environment, managers widely appeal to modern methods and techniques that would help them cope with the competition and offer their customers new, attractive, good quality products and services and at competitive prices. In this context, total quality management...

Despite the importance of intra-firm trades in theories of the firm, an empirical literature using proxy measures has documented surprisingly little such trade. I revisit this conclusion using economy-wide firm-level data from South Korea, where related-party trades are directly observable. I...

In today's competitive markets, the importance of good scheduling strategies in manufacturing companies lead to the need of developing efficient methods to solve complex scheduling problems. In this paper, we studied two production scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setups times. The...

Aware of the importance of developing new alternatives to improve the performance of the companies, our purpose in this paper is to develop a medium term production planning model that deals with the concepts of Partnerships and Reverse Logistics. Our model takes advantage of the synergies of...

In the German automobile industry the vertical integration, as an indicator of value added, is on average low. Beyond the argument of relative high labour costs for manufacturing, several specific reasons for the level of vertical integration, linked to the flexibility of business administration...

In the German automobile industry the vertical integration, as an indicator of value added, is on average low. Beyond the argument of relative high labour costs for manufacturing, several specific reasons for the level of vertical integration, linked to the flexibility of business administration...

The airline's scheduling process is intended to provide a plan on the operating patterns of the companies' aircraft and their resources, to meet the anticipated demand. The schedules' plans are usually based on one season only. However, they should be integrated into a long-term corporate plans,...