Most hospitals in the US provide and manage durable surgical instruments used in operating rooms. Instruments are customarily stored and delivered to operating rooms as trays (kits). The advantages of organizing instruments into custom trays have been discussed elsewhere. They include:...

The wide spread adoption of ERP systems together with customer relationship management applications has increased the ability of a firm to share operational data with customers. In this paper we analyze the factors that determine whether or not this information sharing will benefit the firm. We...

We consider a firm that provides multiple services using both specialized and flexible capacity. The problem is formulated as a two-stage single-period stochastic program. The firm invests in capacity before the actual demand is known and optimally assigns capacity to customers when demand is...

Much of the literature on product line design or product line selection focuses on revenues or market share maximization, but in many cases, the true objective is to maximize profit. In this paper, we survey the literature on models that address decisions regarding the conceptual design of...

We consider the work flow in a medical teaching facility, examining the process that involves an initial patient exam by a resident physician, a subsequent conference between the resident and the attending physician, and the attending physician's visit with the patient. We create an analytical...

Designing and pricing a product-line is the very essence of every business. In recent years quantitative methods to assist managers in this task have been gaining in popularity. Conjoint analysis is already widely used to measure preferences for different product profiles, and build market...

A central problem in marketing is: how should the firm position (reposition) and price a line of related (substitute) products in order to maximize profits (or welfare). We formulate this problem faced by a monopolist as a mathematical program, outline how to obtain the market data from a sample...