2015 Informs Annual Meeting

TB46

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

TB47 47-Room 104B, CC Supply Chain Social Responsibility Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Sustainable Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Robert Swinney, Associate Professor, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Dr, Durham, NC, 27708, United States of America, robert.swinney@duke.edu 1 - Supply Chain Social and Environmental Performance: Measurement, Improvement and Disclosure Basak Kalkanci, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 W Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA, United States of America, Basak.Kalkanci@scheller.gatech.edu, Erica Plambeck Firms are beginning to measure the social and environmental impacts associated with their products and (in a few cases) report those impacts to investors and consumers. Supply chain strategy and structure influence a firm’s costs and benefits from impact measurement, reduction and disclosure. We evaluate how a mandate for disclosure affect impacts, firm expected profit, and its valuation by investors. 2 - Impact of Supply Chain Transparency on Sustainability under NGO Scrutiny Shi Chen, Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States of America, shichen@uw.edu, Qinqin Zhang, Yong-Pin Zhou We study the use of supply chain transparency as an effective tool to mitigate supply chain sustainability issues, and in particular, whether the buyer should reveal her supplier list, knowing that revealed suppliers could face a different level of NGO scrutiny than the unrevealed ones. We incorporate the strategic interactions among a buyer, her suppliers, and the independent NGOs. 3 - Responsible Sourcing via Vertical Integration and Horizontal Sourcing Adem Orsdemir, Assistant Professor, University of California Riverside, School of Business Administration, Anderson Hall, Riverside, CA, 92507, United States of America, adem.orsdemir@ucr.edu, Bin Hu, Vinayak Deshpande Vertical integration is a viable way to achieve responsible sourcing. In a competitive setting, we analyze a firm’s integration and responsible sourcing decisions. We find that demand externality and possibility of supplying the competitor may fundamentally change firms’ behaviors. Furthermore, high probability of violation detection may discourage responsible sourcing. 4 - Investing in Supply Chain Transparency for Social Responsibility Leon Valdes, lvaldes@mit.edu, Tim Kraft, Karen Zheng We study a manufacturer’s decisions when the social responsibility performance of his supplier cannot be perfectly observed. The manufacturer can invest to increase the transparency of his supply chain and the performance of his supplier. An NGO may communicate to consumers the true level of social responsibility, potentially decreasing profits. TB48 48-Room 105A, CC Operational Issues in Agriculture Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/iFORM Sponsored Session Chair: Onur Boyabatli, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Singapore Management University, 50 Stamford Road 04-01, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore, 178899, Singapore, oboyabatli@smu.edu.sg 721 University Avenue, Syracuse, NY, 13244, United States of America, bkazaz@syr.edu, Scott Webster, Nur Ayvaz-cavdaroglu We consider the problem of price-setting by a cooperative for an agricultural product with the following characteristics: (1) the open-market price for the product depends on yield and on quality and (2) the quality of the product is influenced by farmer investments over the growing season. We identify a simple pricing scheme that shows potential to improve performance, and we characterize the drivers and the magnitude of performance improvement. 1 - Agricultural Cooperative Pricing of Premium Product Burak Kazaz, Associate Professor, Syracuse University,

4 - Learning, Revising, and Forgetting Multidimensional Contextual Features for Online Ad Selection John Turner, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine, Room SB2 338, The Paul Merage School of Business, Irvine, CA, 92697-3125, United States of America, john.turner@uci.edu, Tianbing Xu, Amelia Regan, Yaming Yu We study how best to match ads to viewers using high-dimensional contextual features (demographic, browsing behavior) to predict click-through probability. Using Thompson Sampling in a Bayesian framework, our model learns the importance of contextual features while adapting/forgetting over time, capturing changing individuals’ tastes and shifts in the viewing population’s composition. TB46 46-Room 104A, CC Service Models in MSOM Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Service Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Opher Baron, University of Toronto, 105 St George St, Toronto, ON, Canada, opher.baron@rotman.utoronto.ca 1 - Worker Flexibility Training and Production Decision Rights Gad Allon, Professor, Kellogg School of Management, allon@kellogg.northwestern.edu, Achal Bassamboo, Evan Barlow We explore the interaction between production decision rights and workers’ decisions on training to become flexible resources. Research on flexible resources is prevalent in the operations management literature. Human resources, however, are decision makers and have rights to decide on their own training levels. Many firms, however, have also given workers some production decision rights. We show how the workers’ training decisions are affected by the identity of the production decision maker. 2 - Revenue Maximization for Cloud Computing Services Cinar Kilcioglu, Columbia Business School, New York, NY, 10027, United States of America, ckilcioglu16@gsb.columbia.edu, Costis Maglaras We study a stylized model of revenue maximization for cloud computing services, analyze price data traces from the biggest cloud service provider, Amazon, provide some possible explanation for price spikes based on intuitive asymptotic analysis arguments in systems with large scale capacity and large market potential, and ultimately study the revenue maximization problem faced by the service provider that operates in an infinite capacity system and in a market with multiple customer types. 3 - Admission and Discharge Decisions in Intensive Care Units Huiyin Ouyang, UNC Department of Statistics & Operations Research, 318 Hanes Hall, CB# 3260, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599- 3260, United States of America, ouyang5@live.unc.edu, Serhan Ziya, Nilay Argon We formulate a MDP model for admission decisions in an ICU where patients’ health conditions change over time according to Markovian probabilities, We find that the optimal decision can depend on the mix of patients in the ICU and provide an analytic characterization of the optimal policy. We also identify conditions under which the optimal policy is state-independent. 4 - Tandem Queues with Reneging – Analysis and Insights Jianfu Wang, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Business School, NTU, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60201, United States of America, g-

50 Nanyang Avenue, NTU, Singapore, Singapore, wangjf@ntu.edu.sg, Opher Baron, Oded Berman, Hossein Abouee Mehrizi

This paper considers tandem queueing systems with reneging. We develop a new technique to solve two dimensional Markov Chains with non-repeating structure. Our technique can be applied to additional settings and used to derive different service level measures. We demonstrate this technique on a two-station tandem queueing model with reneging, which has been considered analytically intractable.

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