We analyze strategic relationships between buyers and sellers in markets with switching costs and dynamic uncertainty by investigating the scenario wherein a representative buyer trades with two foreign sellers located in the same foreign country. We show that, under exchange rate uncertainty,...

Motivated by interactions with a major player in the aerospace industry, we consider the relationship between a supplier of specialty material forgings and a buyer that manufactures airplane components by extensively machining down these forgings as per component design specifications. Due to...

Many online retail channels face high rates of product returns. This poses a new challenge to the sellers' dynamic pricing problem when some returns in good condition can be resold in the selling season. To study the impact of product returns and guide sellers to adjust pricing policies, we...

An important difference between both manufacturing and wholesaling vs. retail is the information available concerning inventory. Typically, far less information characterizes retail. Here, an extreme environment of information shortfall is examined. The environment is technically termed...

We study a supply planning problem in a manufacturing system with two stages. The first stage is a remanufacturer that supplies two closely-related components to the second (manufacturing) stage, which uses each component as the basis for its respective product. The used products are recovered...

Flexible robotic cells combine the capabilities of robotic flow shops with those of flexible manufacturing systems. In an m-machine flexible cell, each part visits each machine in the same order. However, the m operations can be performed in any order, and each machine can be configured to...

This paper considers the problem of scheduling operations in bufferless robotic cells that produce identical parts. Finding a cyclic solution that minimizes the long-run average time to produce a part has long been a fundamental open problem. Most research has been focused on finding an optimal...