The main advantage of a procurement combinatorial auction (CA) is that it allows suppliers to express cost synergies through package bids. However, bidders can also strategically take advantage of this flexibility, by discounting package bids and "inflating"' bid prices for single-items, even in...

In many service industries the speed of service and support by experienced employees are two major drivers of service quality. When demand for a service is variable and the staffing requirements cannot be adjusted quickly, choosing capacity levels requires making a trade-off between service...

Automobile manufacturers in the U.S. supply chain exhibit significant differences in their days-of-supply of finished vehicles (average inventory divided by average daily sales rate). For example, from 1995 to 2004, Toyota consistently carried approximately 30 fewer days-of-supply than General...

Labor costs are one of the largest expenses of retail companies. This work develops a decision support tool to manage staffing levels and schedule working shifts, balancing the sales contribution of employees with salary costs. We extend recent empirical studies that estimate the impact of...