We integrate production and distribution decisions in a recovery planning model for a disrupted production system to minimize the negative impacts of disruption on its profit and customers' satisfaction. The problem is originally motivated by the real-life case of an explosion disaster occurred in September 2015 in a leading producer of household consumer goods in Iran. Multiple recovery polici...

Knowledge about customers is vital for supply chains in order to ensure customer satisfaction. In an ideal supply chain environment, supply chain partners are able to perform planning tasks collaboratively, because they share information. However, customers are not always able or willing to share information with their suppliers. End consumers, on the one hand, do not usually provide a retail c...

Modern Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides flexible access to data center resources on demand in an elastic fashion to meet the highly variable workload requirements of cloud applications. Cloud providers aim to provision resources as efficiently and as quickly as possible to their consumers. However, the lack of information about the hosted applications and their workloads makes it har...

Relatively little is known about adoption, use, and disadoption of new internet-based services. Using data from an Internet grocer in a market where it was the monopoly provider of this service, we examine customer adoption, use, and disadoption of online grocery shopping. We find that adoption was significant. In zip codes where the service was offered, 1-3 percent of households signed-up for ...

Current electricity tariffs for retail rarely provide incentives for intelligent demand response of flexible customers. Such customers could otherwise contribute to balancing supply and demand in future smart grids. This paper proposes an innovative risk-sharing tariff to incentivize intelligent customer behavior. A two-step parameterized payment scheme is proposed, consisting of a prepayment b...

Industrial buyer-seller relationships are frequently characterized by the fact that the seller and/or the buyer have to dedicate specific up-front investments to the relationship. Marketing research analyzes these relationships on the basis of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). TCE highlights the risk of hold-up which arises after specific investments are dedicated. However, exogenous uncertaint...

Perceived risk is the uncertainty of customers due to unpredictability of product qualities and consequences. It is the precondition of further consumption. Based on the perceived risk theory, in this article, we measure the customer’s perceived risk of on-line group purchase; then establish fuzzy synthetic evaluation model of perceived risk; analyze customer behavior; and finally draw a conclu...

Online channels generate frictions when selling products with non-digital attributes, such as apparel. Customers may be reluctant to purchase products they have not been able to try on and those customers who do purchase may return products when they do not fit as expected. Virtual fitting-room technologies provide information about how a product fits a particular customer and promise to mitiga...

expert systems are computer programs that make the knowledge of experts available when a human expert is not with in easy reach. the systems are to simulate the thinking and inference pattern of human being. the ultimate goal of expert system is to be analogous to human as much as possible. utilizing the intelligent system in commerce is indispensable for establishing a better connection with c...