Recent cases of product adulteration by foreign suppliers have compelled many manufacturers to rethink approaches to deterring suppliers from cutting corners, especially when manufacturers cannot fully monitor and control the suppliers' actions. In this paper, we study three mechanisms for...

Consumers and governments are pressuring firms to strike a balance between profitability and sustainability. However, this balance can only be maintained in the long run if the firm can take a holistic approach to sustain the financial flow (profit), resource flow (planet) and development flow...

As policy makers seek to draw lessons from the growth of Chinese manufacturing, we need to better understand the evolving strategies adopted by Chinese manufacturers since the economic reforms of the 1980s. Focusing on the apparel and electronics sectors, we look at how Chinese manufacturers...

When a product's price fluctuates at a store, how should rational, cost-minimizing shoppers shop for it? Specifically, how frequently should they visit the store, and how much of the product should they buy when they get there? Would this rational shopping behavior differ across Every Day Low...

We propose a game-theoretical model of a retailer who sells a limited inventory of a product over a finite selling season by using one of two inventory display formats: display all (DA) and display one (DO). Under DA, the retailer displays all available units so that each arriving customer has...

Expanding product variety and high customer service provision are both major challenges for manufacturers to compete in the global market. In addition to many ongoing programs, such as lead-time reduction, redesigning products and processes so as to delay the point of product differentiation is...

We model a situation in which two retailers consider launching an "Advance Booking Discount" (ABD) program. In this program, customers are enticed to precommit their orders at a discount price prior to the regular selling season. However, these precommitted orders are filled during the selling...

Consider a plant that has information about the arrival schedule of its "inputs" over a planning cycle. The plant has parallel production lines for processing multiple types of products. However, changeover cost and changeover time are incurred when a line changes from processing one type of...

Tackling the steep increase in drug costs is an especially important issue among many health care providers and insurers. To entice the clinics to become more cost efficient, the U.S. federal government, as well as many HMOs, have developed various cost containment initiatives recently. However,...

When managing a project with uncertain completion time and unobservable contractor's work rate, self-interest can create conflicts between the project manager and the contractor leading to actions that reduce the profits of both. We first investigate how the concept of supply contract...