When supply disruption occurs following major disasters, many supply chains tend to breakdown due to stock-outs or lost sales and take a long time to recover. However, by keeping one or more emergency sources of supply, some supply chains continue to function smoothly, satisfying consumer demand even after a major disaster. In this study, we use the game-theory-based framework to model a supply...

This paper considers a manufacturer-retailer supply chain for a seasonal product whose demand is weather-sensitive. The retailer orders from the manufacturer (supplier) prior to the selling season and then sells to the market. We examine how a manufacturer can structure a weather-linked rebate to improve his expected profit. The proposed class of rebate contracts offers several advantages over ...

Variations in milk and feed prices directly affect dairy farm risk management decisions. This research used data from the 2010 US Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Resource Management Surveys phase III dairy survey to examine how risk management tools affected revenues and expenses across US dairy farms. The survey was sent to 26 states and collected information on costs and returns to ind...

We study a supply chain in which a manufacturer relies on a salesperson to sell the products to the consumers. The sales outcome is determined by a random market condition and the salesperson’s service level, both of which are privately observed by the salesperson. Apart from them, there are two types of resellers: a knowledgeable reseller observes the market condition, whereas a diligent resel...

The STD experiments in Guatemala from 1946-1948 have earned a place of infamy in the history of medical ethics. But if the Guatemala STD experiments were so "ethically impossible," how did the U.S. government approve their funding? Although much of the literature has targeted the failings of Dr. John Cutler, we focus on the institutional context and research ethos that shaped the outcome of the...

Systematic, well-designed research provides the most effective approach to the solution of many problems facing highway administrators and engineers. Often, highway problems are of local interest and can best be studied by highway departments individually or in cooperation with their state universities and others. However, the accelerating growth of highway transportation develops increasingly ...

Retail energy providers (REPs) can employ different strategies such as offering demand response (DR) programs, participating in bilateral contracts, and employing self-generation distributed generation (DG) units to avoid financial losses in the volatile electricity markets. In this paper, the problem of setting dynamic retail sales price by a REP is addressed with a robust optimization techniq...

In a setting in which franchisees that operate under a common brand name have incentives to free-ride on each other’s sales e¤ort, we examine how a franchisor uses investment requirements as a tool to reduce franchisees’underprovision of sales e¤ort. Theoretically, we show that if the franchisor’s reputation is highly important the franchisor asks for higher investment requirements when penaliz...

PURPOSE To determine the amount of importance audiologists place on various items related to their selection of a preferred hearing aid brand manufacturer. RESEARCH DESIGN Three hundred forty-three hearing aid-dispensing audiologists rated a total of 32 randomized items by survey methodology. RESULTS Principle component analysis identified seven orthogonal statistical factors of importance....

A major concern in the design of wholesale electricity markets is the potential for the exercise of market power by generating unit owners. To better understand the determinants of generating unit owner market power and how it is exercised, this paper derives a model of bidding behavior in a competitive electricity market which incorporates various sources of uncertainty and the impact of the e...