We study how rework routing together with wage and piece rate compensation can strengthen incentives for quality. Traditionally, rework is assigned back to the agent who generates the defect (in a self routing scheme) or to another agent dedicated to rework (in a dedicated routing scheme). In...

Moving production to low-wage countries may reduce manufacturing costs but increases logistics costs and is subject to foreign trade barriers, among others. This paper studies a manufacturer s multimarket facility network design problem and investigates the offshoring decision from a network...

After decades of offshoring production across the world, companies are rethinking their global networks. Local sourcing is receiving more attention, but it remains challenging to balance the offshore sourcing cost advantage against the increased inventories due to its longer leadtime, and...

Conventional optimization algorithms that prescribe order packing instructions (which items to pack in which sequence in which box) focus on box volume utilization yet tend to overlook human behavioral deviations. We observe that packing workers at the warehouses of Alibaba Group deviate from...

Traditional queuing theory assumes types are known or perfectly observed, and each type is typically put in its type-specific queue which is prioritized using some version of the celebrated c-mu rule; we call this type-based queueing. We study feature-based priority queuing where types are not...

A last time buy provides the final opportunity for a manufacturer to order a spare part before it is retired from a supplier’s production line. Last time buys are common in durable goods industries and can allow manufacturers of heavy equipment, machinery or airplanes to continue supporting...

Click tracking is gaining in popularity and the practice of web analytics is growing fast. Whether strategic customers are willing to visit a website when they know their clicks may be tracked is an important yet complex problem which depends on various factors. Using a newsvendor framework, we...

We review academic research on dual-sourcing (or dual-mode) dynamic stochastic inventory models, which study the replenishment of inventory from two sources (or two transportation modes) in the presence of demand uncertainty. The classic assumption, also adopted here, is that the two sources...

We investigate how volume flexibility, defined by a sourcing cost premium beyond a base capacity, at a local responsive supplier impacts the decision to reshore supply. The buyer also has access to a remote supplier that is cheaper with no restrictions on volume flexibility. We show that with...