Governments across the world constantly use a variety of measures to contain drug costs in order to increase patient access to critical medications. External Reference Pricing (ERP), or international price comparison, is a commonly employed policy to control prices of pharmaceuticals. ERP uses...

An emerging financial innovation enabled by the Blockchain technology in agricultural supply chains is the capability to “tip the farmers.” This innovation empowers socially- conscious customers to identify the individual farmers of their sustainably-sourced products and reward these farmers...

Problem definition: JD.com is the largest online retailer in China, serving millions of customers every day. We use JD’s sales data for a particular product category to examine what features and characteristics have the highest impact on JD’s customers’ behavior and sales....

The U.S. Congress needs to determine subsidies for wind energy before they expire at the end of this year. Traditionally, the government has allowed each wind investor to choose its preferred subsidy among two types of subsidies: First is the investment subsidy which reduces the initial...

Annual influenza outbreaks incur great expenses in both human and monetary terms, and billions of dollars are being allocated for influenza pandemic preparedness in an attempt to avert even greater potential losses. Vaccination is a primary weapon for fighting influenza outbreaks. The influenza...

Healthcare reimbursements in the US have been traditionally based upon a fee-for-service (FFS) scheme, providing incentives for high volume of care, rather than efficient care. The new healthcare legislation tests new payment models that remove such incentives, such as the bundled payment (BP)...

Multiple myeloma is an incurable cancer of bone marrow plasma cells with a median overall survival of 5 years. With newly approved drugs to treat this disease over the last decade, physicians are afforded more opportunities to tailor treatment to individual patients and thereby improve survival...

The traditional payment system between an insurer and providers does not incentivize providers to limit their prices nor patients to choose less expensive providers, hence contributing to high insurer expenditures. Reference pricing has been proposed as a way to better align incentives and...

We propose and analyze robust optimization models of an inventory management problem, where cumulative purchase, inventory and shortage costs over n periods are minimized for correlated non-identically distributed demand. We assume that the means and covariance matrix of stochastic demand are...