In a firm that makes schedule, orders are always processed within a fixed time frame. In a congested facility, such a situation would be impossible using conventional queuing logic. We propose a conceptual model of a firm in which workers make schedule by rushing jobs, if necessary, with...

This paper considers single-item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale. Bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that behave myopically up to a specified stopping time. The...

The majority of papers on stochastic inventory theory make the assumption that the distribution of consumer demand in each time period is known with certainty. While this assumption is unsupported in many applied contexts, it is conventionally held that more realistic models are more difficult...

In some mechanism design problems, finite-type spaces may be natural ones to consider, yet the current literature is dominated by analyses of continuous-type spaces. This probably derives from the intellectual dominance of the early work in this area. Here we present an analysis of the...

A large midwestern hospital is expecting an increase in surgical caseload. New operating room (OR) capacity can be had by building new ORs or extending the working hours in the current ORs. The choice among these options is complicated by the fact that patients, surgeons and surgical staff, and...