Operations & Supply Chain Management

We study a family of stylized assortment planning problems, where arriving customers make purchase decisions among offered products based on maximizing their utility. Given limited display capacity and no a priori information on consumers' utility, the retailer must select which subset of products to offer. By offering different assortments and observing the resulting purchase behavior, the retailer learns about consumer preferences, but this experimentation should be balanced with the goal of maximizing revenues.

In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multi Nomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models starting with the case where each product in the market is sold by a separate, independent firm. Here we identify a natural upper bound for the price levels.

Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value).

Timely access to care is a key component of high quality health care. Yet, patient delays are prevalent throughout the health-care system resulting in dissatisfaction and adverse clinical consequences for patients as well as potentially higher costs and wasted capacity for providers. For this reason, the Institute of Medicine has identified "timeliness" as one of the six keys in "aims for improvement" in its health-care quality initiative.

Motivated by applications in financial services, we consider a seller who offers prices sequentially to a stream of potential customers, observing either success or failure in each sales attempt. The parameters of the underlying demand model are initially unknown, so each price decision involves a trade-off between learning and earning. Attention is restricted to the simplest kind of model uncertainty, where one of two demand models is known to apply, and we focus initially on performance of the myopic Bayesian policy (MBP), variants of which are commonly used in practice.

Hospital ambulance diversions are prevalent and increasing nationwide as emergency departments experience growing congestion. Using negative binomial regressions, this paper links the number of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) deaths to the level and extent of diversion in the five boroughs of New York City. The results indicate that both high levels of ambulance diversion and simultaneous diversion across hospitals are associated with increasing numbers of deaths from AMI.

This chapter reviews multiproduct dynamic pricing models for a revenue maximizing monopolist firm. The baseline model studied in this article is of a seller that owns a fixed capacity of a resource that is consumed in the production or delivery of some type of product. The seller selects a dynamic pricing strategy for the offered product so as to maximize its total expected revenues over a finite time horizon.