Panic-buying and shortages of essential commodities is common during early phases of a disaster or an epidemic. The goal of this paper is develop a methodology which includes social media information in optimization models of searching essential commodities during disasters and improves the...

As more households in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are lifted out of poverty, it becomes increasingly difficult to address the remaining poor by implementing traditional cash transfer programs due to inaccurate identification and the welfare dependency issue. One solution is to implement...