2015 Informs Annual Meeting

WD40

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

WD40 40- Room 101, CC Operations Management/Marketing Interface III Contributed Session Chair: Ashkan Negahban, Auburn University, 3301 Shelby Center, Auburn, AL, 36849, United States of America, anegahban@auburn.edu 1 - Fulfillment Service in Online Marketplaces Dominant online retailers,such as Amazon.com and Sears.com, allow small retailers to sell on their online marketplaces and offer fulfillment service to handle the order fulfillment activities for small retailers. In exchange, small retailers pay a fulfillment fee per unit of sales. In this paper,we investigate the benefit of such fulfillment programs and study the optimal fulfillment fees for the dominant retailer. 2 - Try Before You Buy Pricing: Should Rental Fees Apply to Purchases? Monire Jalili, University of Oregon, 1208 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States of America, mjalili@uoregon.edu, Michael Pangburn When a product has uncertain value or is used repeatedly over time, customers may opt to rent before purchase. Some sellers entice purchase conversions by offering part of a paid rental price as a subsequent discount. Other sellers offer no such credit. We analyze the optimal pricing and discount policy for a monopolist selling to a market of consumers facing uncertain product value, and derive the conditions under which sellers should optimally apply some of the rental price towards a purchase. 3 - Responding to Forecasting Errors for New Products: An Agent-based Simulation Approach Ashkan Negahban, Auburn University, 3301 Shelby Center, Auburn, AL, 36849, United States of America, anegahban@auburn.edu, Jeffrey S. Smith Many real-world examples show that even companies with significant experience in successful product launches have faced huge financial losses due to incorrect demand forecasts for their new products. We consider the case where the demand for the new product grows beyond expectations and use agent-based simulation to evaluate different after-the-fact reactive strategies including capacity expansion, viral marketing, and sales control to reduce potential losses under different market dynamics. WD41 41-Room 102A, CC Scheduling in Healthcare Operations Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Shrutivandana Sharma, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, Singapore, 487372, Singapore, shrutivandana@sutd.edu.sg Co-Chair: Hossein Abouee Mehrizi, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Department of Management Sciences, waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada, haboueemehrizi@uwaterloo.ca 1 - Long Term Surgery Planning and Scheduling Maya Bam, University of Michigan, 1205 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, United States of America, mbam@umich.edu, Brian Denton, Mark Van Oyen Scheduling surgeries in a timely manner is a challenge due to competing criteria, such as patient wait time and the availability and utilization of multiple resources (i.e., operating room, surgical service block time). Based on collaboration with a local hospital, we present a mixed integer programming planning model that strives to achieve high resource utilization and provide timely access. 2 - Data-driven Patient Scheduling in Emergency Departments Wenjing Shen, Drexel University, 3220 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States of America, ws84@drexel.edu, Gangshu Cai, Xiangfeng Chen Meilin Zhang, PhD Candidate, NUS Business School, BIZ 2 Building, 1 Business Link, Singapore 117592, Singapore, Si, 117592, Singapore, 214101@gmail.com, Shuangchi He, Melvyn Sim We focus on the dynamic scheduling of Emergency Department (ED) patients aiming to mitigate the ED crowding and consequential delays. We propose a novel modeling framework for this patient flow control based on robust optimization approach which is of high fidelity to real ED operations. Our

numerical study is inspired from empirical data and the proposed policy well retains the computation tractability and yields promising benefits on achieving ED targets comparing to other common policies. 3 - Combined Advance and Appointment Scheduling Mehmet Begen, Ivey Business School - Western University, Appointment scheduling and advance scheduling have generally been addressed as two separate problems despite being highly dependent on each other. We attempt to develop a framework that combines the two problems and present our findings. 4 - Determining Non-clinical Predictors of Hospital Ward Length-of-stay Taylor Corcoran, PhD Student, UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States of America, taylor.corcoran.1@anderson.ucla.edu, Ira Hofer, Nirav Kamdar, Elisa Long Post-surgical hospital length-of-stay is influenced by patient acuity and surgery procedure, and other factors including patient demographics, ward assignment, surgeon, census levels, discharge day and location. We design an econometric model to identify non-clinical predictors of length-of-stay using 24 months of data from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which regularly experiences occupancy near 100%. Reduced ward length-of-stay could alleviate congestion and improve on-time surgeries. WD43 43-Room 103A, CC Pricing & Revenue Management with New Ingredients Sponsor: Revenue Management and Pricing Sponsored Session Chair: Xin Geng, Xin.Geng@sauder.ubc.ca 1 - Threshold Discounts Comparison: Across-the-board or Partial? Thunyarat Amornpetchkul, Faculty Member, NIDA Business School, 118 Seri-Thai Road, Bangkapi, Boonchana-Atthakorn Bldg. 8th Fl., Bangkok, 10240, Thailand, thunyarat.a@nida.ac.th An increasingly ubiquitous discount format that is taking over traditional price cuts is “threshold discount,” under which a price reduction is awarded to a purchase that meets a minimum quantity or minimum spending requirement. We consider the use of two popular discount schemes: all-unit and incremental discount, in a retail setting. Our focus is to investigate when it is more profitable for the retailer to offer an all-unit discount or an incremental discount. 2 - In Parallel to Ongoing Efforts to Deoptimial Contract Designs for Carbon Capture and Storage Systems Wenbo Selina Cai, Assistant Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, cai@njit.edu, Dashi Singham In parallel to ongoing efforts to develop improved CCS technology, we model the decision processes of CCS participants who face uncertainty in both costs and emissions, and optimize incentives to encourage storage operators to provide the service of transportation and storage of CO2 from emitters who have heterogeneous emissions profiles. We also evaluate the impact of the cap-and- trade carbon policy on CCS participants’ sequestration efforts and storage operators’ performance. 3 - Consumer Subsidies in Developing Economies: Advance Selling and Self-control Qiao-Chu He, PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, 1117 Etcheverry Hall, Berkeley, CA. United States of America, heqc0425@berkeley.edu, Zuo-jun Max Shen, Ying-ju Chen We present an explanation to the product adoption puzzle in developing economies via consumers’ lack of self-control due to their present-bias. We explore the roles of advance selling and consumer subsidy in resolving this puzzle. 4 - Advance Selling to Strategic Consumers: Preorder Contingent Pricing or Preorder Contingent Production Mike Wei, Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo, 326C Jacobs Management Center, Buffalo, 14260, United States of America, mcwei@buffalo.edu, Fuqiang Zhang Motivated by emerging industry practices, this paper studies the effectiveness of two new advance selling strategies in counteracting strategic consumer behavior: the preorder contingent production (PCQ) strategy and the preorder contingent pricing (PCP) strategy, where the seller’s preorder production and price are a function of the preorder quantities respectively. 1255 Western Road, London, ON, N6G0N1, Canada, mbegen@ivey.uwo.ca, Jonathan Patrick, Antoine Sauré

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