2015 Informs Annual Meeting

TB50

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

2 - Planning for Product Substitution in Seed Business Saurabh Bansal, Assistant Professor, Penn State University, 405 Business Building, University Park, PA, 16802, United States of America, sub32@psu.edu We present new analytical results to manage seed substitution in the agribusiness domain, and discuss results of an empirical case study in collaboration with an industry partner. 3 - Government Intervention and Crop Diversification in Agricultural Supply Chains Duygu Gunaydin Akkaya, Stanford GSB, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States of America, duygug@stanford.edu, Kostas Bimpikis, Hau Lee Agricultural supply chains face immense risks including yield and market price uncertainty. In order to mitigate these risks, farmers can engage in crop diversification. Governments also take a role in supporting farmers’ income and implement various subsidies to alleviate poverty in the farmer population. We study how interventions and diversification practices impact the supply chain in the presence of random yield and endogenous market price. 4 - Corn or Soybean: Dynamic Farmland Allocation under Uncertainty 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, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang Zhou This paper studies the farmland allocation decision of a farmer between two crops in a multi-period framework. In each period, the farmer chooses the allocation in the presence of revenue uncertainty, and crop rotation benefits across periods. We characterize the optimal policy and investigate the impact of revenue uncertainty. We propose a heuristic allocation policy which is near-optimal. TB49 49-Room 105B, CC Retail Operations Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Supply Chain Sponsored Session Chair: Chris Parker, Pennsylvania State University, 411 Business Building, University Park, PA, 16802, United States of America, chris.parker@psu.edu 1 - Supply Chain Structure and Multimarket Competition O. Cem Ozturk, Assistant Professor Of Marketing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 West Peachtree St. NW., Atlanta, GA, 30308, United States of America, cem.ozturk@scheller.gatech.edu, Necati Tereyagoglu We study the role of supply chain structure in determining competitive intensity when manufacturers and retailers encounter in multiple markets. Our theoretical model shows how the differences in supply network overlap across multiple markets lead to higher retail prices. Using an extensive scanner data set, we find empirical support for the analytical results. These findings show the importance of supply chain structure in assessing multimarket competition among firms. 2 - Value of Downward Substitution under Stochastic Prices Fehmi Tanrisever, Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey, tanrisever@bilkent.edu.tr, Zumbul Atan, Junchi Tan Downward substitution as a form of operational flexibility has received significant academic attention. The literature on downward substitution follows the main stream inventory literature and assumes uncertain demand and/or yield and explores the value of substitution flexibility. They, however, assume fixed prices which may distort the analysis in many industries where prices may fluctuate. In this paper, we explore the effect of price uncertainty on the value of downward substitution. 3 - Supply Chain Contracts that Prevent Information Leakage Yiwei Chen, Assistant Professor, Renmin University of China, NO. 59 Zhongguancun Street, Beijing, China, chenyiwei@rbs.org.cn, Ozalp Ozer We study a supply chain with one supplier and two competing retailers (incumbent and entrant). The incumbent has better but imprecise private forecast. We explore general conditions that a wide range of contracts need to satisfy to prevent the supplier from leaking the incumbent’s private forecast to the entrant. We define two groups of contracts based on how the supplier and retailers share inventory risks. We find only these two groups of contracts may avoid information leakage.

4 - Experience and Competition Effects in Penny Auctions Chris Parker, Pennsylvania State University, 411 Business Building, University Park, PA, 16802, United States of America, chris.parker@psu.edu, Pranav Jindal, Tony Kwasnica, Peter Newberry The internet has created many new online retail opportunities. One such model is the penny auction, an ascending first-price auction where bidders pay a fee to bid and increase the price by a nominal amount. The winning bidder pays the auction price and receives the item with all other bidders receiving nothing. We utilize a detailed dataset from a penny auction company to investigate the effects of experience and competition on bidding behavior and auction outcomes. Value Chain Innovations in Developing Economies Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Sponsored Session Chair: Saibal Ray, Professor, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Canada, saibal.ray@mcgill.ca Co-Chair: Fei Qin, Post-doc Research Fellow, McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management, Montreal, QC, Canada 1 - Milking the Quality Test: Improving the Milk Supply Chain under Competing Collection Intermediaries We examine the quality issues of milk — via deliberate adulteration by milk farmers — acquired by competing collection intermediaries in developing countries. Interestingly, some intuitive interventions such as providing collection stations with better infrastructure (e.g., refrigerators) or subsidizing testing costs could hurt the quality of milk in the presence of competition. The goal of this study is to provide recommendations that address the quality problem with minimal testing. 2 - Low Cost Cataract Surgery in India: What Can Western Health Systems Learn from it? Harish Krishnan, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Harish.Krishnan@sauder.ubc.ca The Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) in India is known for its low-cost business model. However, few studies have done a detailed analysis of the cost structure of a cataract surgery at the AECS. This talk will present cost data from AECS and compare it to similar data at an eye hospital in Canada. The goal is to identify root causes of the cost differences between AECS and western health systems. The barriers to implementing AECS’ innovations in the west will also be discussed. 3 - Multi-treatment Inventory Allocation in Humanitarian Health Settings under Funding Constraints Jayashankar Swaminathan, UNC-Chapel Hill, 300 Kenan Drive, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, United States of America, Jay_Swaminathan@kenan-flagler.unc.edu, Karthik V. Natarajan We study the problem of allocating inventory procured using donor funding to patients in different health states over a finite horizon with the objective of minimizing the number of disease-adjusted life periods lost. The optimal policy is state-dependent and hence, we develop two heuristics for the allocation problem. We also provide analytical results and computational insights regarding how the funding level and funding timing impact program performance. 4 - Micro-entrepreneurship in Agri-food Supply Chains in Developing Economies Fei Qin, McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management, Montreal, QC, H3A1G5, Canada, fei.qin@mcgill.ca, Mehmet Gumus, Saibal Ray Motivated by Veggie-Kart direct farm-to-food initiative for marginal farmers and retailers in developing economies, we examine the impact of supply chain innovations involving micro-entrepreneurs at both upstream and downstream stages, which compete with the traditional spot-market based channel in presence of supply uncertainty. TB50 50-Room 106A, CC Liying Mu, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware, 20 Orchard Rd, Newark, 19716, United States of America, muliying@udel.edu, Milind Dawande, Xianjun Geng, Vijay Mookerjee

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