Problem Definition. Putting customer experience at the heart of service design has become a governing principle of today’s “experience economy.” Echoing this principle, our paper addresses a service designer’s problem of how to select and sequence activities in designing a service...

In the service industry, a service provider may sell a collection of service activities as a package, also known as a service bundle. Empirical studies indicate that the customer's ex-post perception of a service bundle depends on not only the utility of each activity but also the sequence of...

This paper develops an adverse selection model for a two-stage supply chain with one supplier, one retailer, and a potential outside entrant supplier who makes a partially substitutable product. The work is different from most research on entry deterrence that only considers a single-stage...

We concentrate on a principal and agent system often seen in supply chain management studies. Under reasonable conditions, we show that a nearly systematic three-step method can be used to find coordination contracts for the system. The number of terms involved in our contract is in some sense...

This paper addresses two important issues that may affect the operations efficiency in the recycling industry. First, the industry contains many small-scale and inefficient recycling firms, especially in developing countries. Second, the output from recycling a waste product often yields...