Service providers, in the presence of congestion and heterogeneity of customer waiting costs, often introduce a fee-based premier option using which the customers self-segment themselves. Examples of this practice are found in health care (concierge medicine), amusement parks, government...

Problem Definition: Unoccupied waiting feels longer than it actually is. Service providers operationalize this psychological principle by offering entertainment options in waiting areas. A service cluster with a common space provides firms with an opportunity to cooperate in the investment for...

In a two-stage serial supply chain, a periodic flexible policy (PF policy) allows the retailer to receive fixed orders that may depend on demand history in one period of the ordering cycle and order freely in other periods. Existing literature has shown that certain PF policies can significantly...

Two field case studies uncover what we call the bilateral information discounting behavior, wherein one party misrepresents and inflates its requirements and the other party in the relationship discounts it and reciprocates with smaller or slower responses. In supply chains, this behavior...

We develop inventory control strategies for a supplier who is selling a product to a group of human newsvendors. Recent research in newsvendor experiments using human subjects revealed significant behavioral tendencies in the decision making processes of human newsvendors. If the supplier would...

Storage assets are critical for temporal trading of commodities under volatile prices. State-of-the-art methods for managing storage such as the reoptimization heuristic (RH), which are part of commercial software, approximate a Markov decision process (MDP) assuming full information regarding...