We study optimal policies for design reuse in a software project using a control theoretic approach. A project needs to be developed in minimum time by optimally choosing the proportion of effort allocated towards design activities. We first consider a local case, where the benefits of design...

We analyze optimal advertising spending in a duopolistic market where each firm's market share depends on its own and its competitor''s advertising decisions, and is also subject to stochastic disturbances. We develop a differential game model of advertising in which the dynamic behavior is...

This paper studies the optimal advertising policy over the product life cycle of a semi-durable good whose failure rate is a design decision. The product adoption process draws from three sources of consumers: innovators who find the product directly, consumers influenced by advertising, and...

We study the problem of finding an optimal ordering policy that minimizes the present value of the costs incurred over the infinite horizon in a continuous-time two-products inventory model with fixed setup costs, unit production costs, and linear holding and backlog costs. We first consider a...

Problem definition: We study a problem of a retailer that orders from competing strategic suppliers subject to independent or correlated disruptions and responds by setting the retail price on delivery, called responsive pricing. The suppliers set their wholesale prices in a Nash game....

Firms have the choice of developing software as either open source or closed source. The open-source approach to software development has been advocated as a new and better method for developing high quality software than the traditional closed-source approach. In open source, volunteer...

We consider a firm's sourcing problem from one reliable supplier and one unreliable supplier in two price setting scenarios. In the committed pricing scenario, the firm makes the pricing decision before the supply uncertainty is resolved. In the responsive pricing scenario, the firm's pricing...

Inventory control is among the most important topics in operations research because of large investments in inventory and their effect on the profitability of the firms. A systematic analysis of inventory problems began with the development of the classical EOQ formula of Ford W. Harris in 1913,...

We study the problem of optimally allocating effort between software construction and debugging. As construction proceeds, new errors are introduced into the system. The objective is to deliver a system of the highest possible quality (fewest number of errors) subject to the constraint that N...

We present a sufficient condition for a feedback Stackelberg equilibrium of a stochastic differential game on an infinite horizon. This condition gives rise to a system of elliptic partial differential equations involving a static Stackelberg game at the level of Lagrangian. As an example, we...