2015 Informs Annual Meeting

WA47

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

2 - Motivating Process Compliance through Electronic Monitoring Bradley Staats, Associate Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill, United States of America, Bradley_Staats@kenan-flagler.unc.edu, Hengchen Dai, David Hofmann, Katy Milkman We investigate the deployment of electronic monitoring as a way to drive process compliance. We do so using a unique, RFID-based system implemented in 72 hospital units at 42 hospitals. We found that the implementation of electronic monitoring resulted in a large, positive effect on compliance although compliance rates initially increased before they began a gradual decline. Additionally, where monitoring was removed we found that compliance rates declined to below pre- intervention levels. 3 - Social Engagement and Learning in Massive Open Online Courses: Evidence from Field Experiments Dennis Zhang, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60201, United States of America, j-zhang@kellogg.northwestern.edu, Gad Allon, Jan Van Mieghem We study the impact of students’ social engagement levels on their learning outcomes in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with several field experiments. 4 - Patient Perception and Hospital Choice in Mitral Valve Surgery Guihua Wang, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, 701 Tappan Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, United States of America, guihuaw@umich.edu, Jun Li, Wallace Hopp Using a patient-level dataset across 35 New York hospitals, we document wide quality gap among hospitals. We then use a discrete choice model to estimate what influences patient perception of hospital quality and quantify the level of sub-optimality of their choices of hospitals. WA47 47-Room 104B, CC Promoting and Developing Markets for Recycling & Reuse Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Sustainable Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Suvrat Dhanorkar, Assistant Professor, Penn State University, University Park, State College, PA, United States of America, dhanorkarsuvrat@gmail.com 1 - Coopeting for Sustainability Karthik Murali, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States of America, kmurali4@illinois.edu, Anupam Agrawal Motivated by the observation of a spate of collaborative alliances between competing firms to source and sell more sustainable products, we study vertical and horizontal environmental R&D collaboration within and across competing supply chains and the ensuing environmental, social, and economic implications. 2 - The Value of Product Returns: Intertemporal Product Management with Strategic Consumers Narendra Singh, Narendra.Singh@scheller.gatech.edu, Karthik Ramachandran, Ravi Subramanian Consumer product returns are a significant and growing concern in many industries, and firms typically deem returns to be undesirable. We study the impact of returns on the intertemporal product strategy of a firm facing strategic consumers. Importantly, we show that returns may act as a device for the firm to mitigate the well-known time inconsistency problem, and firm profit could increase with the return rate. 3 - Contracting for Reuse under Condition Uncertainty Aditya Vedantam, Assistant Professor, State University of New York, Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States of America, avedanta@purdue.edu, Ananth Iyer Managing the operations of traditional end-of-life disposition of used electronics involving reuse and recycling is complicated by the varying condition of incoming units. We show how uncertainty in the reverse supply chain can be managed by sharing the resale value between the product recovery facility and the customer. Data from a large IT Asset retirement company is presented to support our findings. 4 - Relationship Between Appointments of Sustainability Officers and Performance Priyank Arora, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 W Peachtree

In recent years, firms have been creating and staffing senior-level environmental and sustainability positions. We investigate the association between announcements pertaining to appointments of senior-level environmental or sustainability officers and firm performance.

WA48 48-Room 105A, CC Supply Chain Risk Management Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/iFORM Sponsored Session Chair: Nikolaos Trichakis, HBS, ntrichakis@hbs.edu 1 - Learning from Precursors to Disasters: The Role of Incentives Heikki Peura, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, United Kingdom, hpeura@london.edu, Nitin Bakshi Disaster investigations often reveal that the accident was preceded by near misses – precursor events that could have led to a disaster but did not – that went unreported or unheeded. To avoid disasters, a firm has to rely on employees for mitigation effort; to learn about disaster risk through precursors, it may be dependent on their reports. We examine the role of incentives in mediating the resulting three-way tradeoff between learning, mitigation and reporting. 2 - Inventory Decisions and Signals of Demand Management Capability to Investors Guoming Lai, Univ. of Texas Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX, United States of America, Guoming.Lai@mccombs.utexas.edu, Wenqiang Xiao We study the effects of asymmetric information of demand volatility on the inventory decision of a public firm who cares about not only its operational profits but also its market value. We find that the firm, when it faces a high demand volatility (less efficient), overstocks if the profit margin is low and understocks if the profit margin is high, while the firm with a low demand volatility (more efficient) may either overstock or understock in both cases. 3 - Operationalizing Financial Covenants Gerry Tsoukalas, Assistant Professor, Wharton, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States of America, gtsouk@wharton.upenn.edu We analyze the effectiveness of debt covenants in mitigating ``operationally- driven’’ agency costs. It is shown that a leveraged firm’s inherent operating flexibility can lead to significant agency distortions when optimal interest-only debt contracts are chosen, potentially wiping out as much as half the firm’s value. Conversely, we show that the inclusion of simple financial covenants (widely used in practice) can eliminate these agency distortions and fully restore firm value. WA49 49-Room 105B, CC Inventory Problems in Online Retail Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Supply Chain Sponsored Session Chair: Annie I. Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 426068, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States of America, anniecia@mit.edu 1 - Sparsity-constrained Inventory Placement for Online Retail Annie I. Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 426068, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States of America, anniecia@mit.edu, Stephen Graves We study the problem of placing online retail inventory in the presence of sparsity constraints, which limit the number of fulfillment centers holding an item. The large-scale and combinatorial nature of the problem makes it challenging to obtain the exact optimal solution in a computationally efficient manner. We propose a technique that combines column generation and item aggregation to compute near-optimal solutions efficiently. 2 - Affinity-guided Assortment Selection for Inventory Deployment Zhiwei (tony) Qin, Staff Data Scientist, Walmart Labs, 850 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA, 94066, United States of America, TQin@walmartlabs.com, Jagtej Bewli, Arash Asadi We consider assortment selection problems arising from online retailing inventory deployment, e.g. forward deployment, cross-channel migration. Typically, reducing fulfillment costs due to order splits is an important factor in the selection decision. We describe an optimization framework based on product affinity network and mathematical programming, which is able to adapt to different cost drivers. We also present fulfillment simulation results on real orders data.

St. NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, United States of America, priyank.arora@scheller.gatech.edu, Ravi Subramanian, Manpreet Hora

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