This paper addresses the concept of quality risk in outsourcing. Recent trends in outsourcing extend a contract manufacturer's (CM's) responsibility to several functional areas such as research and development and design in addition to manufacturing. This trend enables an original equipment...

Cheap-talk communication between parties with conflicting interests is common in many business and economic settings. Two distinct behavioral economics theories, the trust-embedded model and the level-k model, have emerged to explain how cheap talk works between human decision makers. The...

This paper determines categories of contracts that facilitate vertical information sharing in a supply chain while precluding horizontal information leakage among competing newsvendors. We consider a supply chain in which retailers replenish inventory from a common supplier to satisfy uncertain...

In many market settings, a customer often obtains assistance from a supplier (or service provider) in order to make better-informed decisions regarding the supplier's product (or service). Because the two parties often have conflicting pecuniary incentives, customer trust and supplier...

We consider a nonstationary, stochastic, multi-stage supply system with a general assembly structure, in which customers can place orders in advance of their future demand requirements. This advance demand information is now recognized in both theory and practice as an important strategy for...

This paper studies a firm's time-to-market decision and subsequent sales channel, pricing and production decisions under three main sources of uncertainty: possibility of qualifying for lucrative sales channels, competitors' time-to-market behavior and price-sensitive uncertain demand. In...

This paper develops a comprehensive framework to optimize new product introduction timing and subsequent production decisions faced by a component supplier. Prior to market entry, the supplier performs process design activities, which improve manufacturing yield and the chances of getting...

This paper studies an inventory management problem faced by an upstream supplier who is in a collaborative agreement, such as vendor managed inventory (VMI), with a retailer. A VMI partnership provides the supplier an opportunity to manage inventory for the supply chain, in exchange for...

We study and empirically quantify how much, in a markdown pricing situation, customers anticipate regret of paying a high price during the regular season or facing the possibility of a stockout during the markdown season. In addition, we provide a framework to quantify the impact of customer...

This paper empirically investigates using the e-mail channel to target customers with a delayed incentive promotion — specifically, gift card promotion — and derives data-driven e-mail targeting policies. Gift card promotions are popular across retailers because they incentivize customers to...