Cooperative advertising is a key incentive offered by a manufacturer to influence retailers' promotional decisions. We study cooperative advertising in a dynamic retail duopoly where a manufacturer sells his product through two competing retailers. We model the problem as a Stackelberg...

We investigate firms' re-manufacturing strategies in the case of a Cournot duopoly. On one hand, re-manufactured products cannibalize sales of new products by the same firm and hurt its profits. On the other, re-manufacturing can be a profitable marketing strategy to target different customer...

The method of variational inequalities is a useful theoretical tool in stochastic control, but there are few problems in which this method leads to an explicit solution. We present such a problem drawn from portfolio management. An agent can distribute his wealth between two investments, one...

We address the problem of finding an optimal financing mix of retained earnings and external equity for maximizing the value of a firm subject to random returns. The problem is formulated as a singular stochastic control for a diffusion process, and the value function satisfies a free-boundary...

We study infinite-horizon stochastic inventory problems with general demand distributions and piecewise linear concave ordering costs. Such costs arise in the important cases of quantity discounts or multiple suppliers. We consider the case of concave cost involving two linear segments. This...

Two types of quantity discounts are treated in the literature, namely, 'all units' discounts and incremental quantity discounts. In the all units quantity discounts model. the discount applies to every unit purchased. As a result, the total purchase cost is a discontinuous function of the...

An asymptotic analysis of a hierarchical manufacturing system with machines subject to breakdown and repair is presented. The machine fluctuations are much faster than the accumulation and discounting of costs, and this gives rise to a limiting problem in which the stochastic machine...

We consider a problem of controlling the production rate of a single machine, single product, stochastic manufacturing system in order to minimize the total discounted inventory /backlog costs. The demand has two components: one is deterministic with constant rate d and the other is stochastic...

We consider a stochastic multi-product inventory model with a ware-housing constraint with the objective of minimizing the expected long-run average cost. Using the vanishing discount approach, a dynamic programming equation and the corresponding verification result are established. The...

We study a two-stage purchase contract with a demand forecast update. The purchase contract provides the buyer an opportunity to adjust an initial commitment based on an updated demand forecast obtained at a later stage. An adjustment, if any, incurs a fixed as well as a variable cost. Using a...