2015 Informs Annual Meeting

WE47

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

2 - Design of Financial Incentive Programs to Promote Net Zero Energy Buildings Alireza Ghalebani, Doctoral Candidate, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, ENB 118, Tampa, FL, 33620, United States of America, Alireza@mail.usf.edu, Tapas K. Das Promoting net zero energy buildings (NZEB) is among key carbon emissions reduction approaches in the U.S. and in the EU countries. We present a mixed integer programming (MIP) model to aid determining the minimum thresholds of financial incentives that would spur growth in NZEBs. The results indicate the threshold values of the incentive program parameters, and show that these thresholds are highly influenced by the levelized cost of electricity from RE and are independent of load profiles. 3 - Environmental Consequences of Inventory Stockout Decisions Hongyan Liang, Kent State University, 800 E Summit Street, Kent, OH, 44240, United States of America, hliang@kent.edu, Alfred Guiffrida, Eddy Patuwo The literature on sustainable inventory management has focused on the carbon footprint with inventory management decisions.Emergence orders are issued to correct a stockout occurrence. The majority of emergency orders involve transportation by motor carriers, which impacts the environment through the carbon footprint. Models for examining the decision to backorder do not address environmental concerns, hence a research opportunity exists to reexamine the decision to backorder or stockout. 4 - A Multi-modal Inventory System with Lead Time Dependent Demands Emre Berk, Bilkent University, Management Faculty, 06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey, eberk@bilkent.edu.tr, Ozgur Toy, Onurcan Ayas We consider an inventory system facing slow moving demand with multi-modal transport opportunities. Customers have waiting time tolerances in cases of stock- outs and societal-impact considerations (e.g., carbon emission sensitivities) for the units they purchase. We investigate mode selection and service contract design. Xiaoyue Jiang, Tulane University, Department of Computer Science, New Orleans, LA, 70118, United States of America, xjiang@tulane.edu, Brent Venable, Leiwen Jiang A “model-free” analysis of global annual mean temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4, from 1850-2014) is developed. By capturing the maximum variability across all time scales covered by the dataset, this envelope-based characterization confirms some widely accepted, in the meantime, strongly disputed understandings and offers new and objective insights and interpretation to future climate change trajectory. WE46 46-Room 104A, CC Studies in Customer Queuing Behavior Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Service Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Robert Batt, Asst. Professor, Wisconsin School of Business, UW- Madison, 975 University Ave., Grainger Hall, 5279, Madison, WI, 53706, United States of America, rbatt@bus.wisc.edu Co-Chair: Laurens Debo, Associate Professor, Dartmouth College, 100 Tuck Hall, Hanover, NH, 03755, United States of America, laurens.g.debo@tuck.dartmouth.edu 1 - Managing Customer Expectations and Priorities with Delay Announcements Gad Allon, Professor, Kellogg School of Management, g-allon@kellogg.northwestern.edu, Achal Bassamboo, Qiuping Yu We study in a service environment, how to manage customers’ expectations and to prioritize customers appropriately to maximize the firm’s profits. Specifically, we focus on a setting where the firm uses only delay announcements and study the opportunities and limitations of this mechanism. We are particularly interested in when and how the customers can be influenced by delay announcements. We provide some structural results and numerical examples. 5 - On Variability of Global Annual Mean Temperature Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60201, United States of America,

2 - Searching for Better Quality and a Shorter Wait Luyi Yang, Doctoral Student, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL, United States of America luyi.yang@chicagobooth.edu, Laurens Debo, Varun Gupta We consider a many-server queueing system in which servers have different qualities. The customer does not know either the quality of the server or its queue length in advance, and is thus engaged in a costly sequential search. We characterize the equilibrium search behavior. We find that reducing the search cost may increase the expected waiting time while increasing the arrival rate may decrease it. 3 - Observational Learning in Congested Environments with Multiple Choice Options Chen Jin, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road,

Evanston, IL, 60208, United States of America, chenjin2011@u.northwestern.edu, Laurens Debo, Mirko Kremer, Seyed Iravani

We study human choice behavior in a congested multi-location system with quality variation among locations and information asymmetry among sequentially arrived customers, i.e. some customers are informed and know the quality of all locations while others don’t (uninformed). Customers all observe the queue length at each location upon arrival. We specify conditions under which uninformed customers join longest queue and join shortest non-empty queue. We also test the results in the laboratory.

WE47 47-Room 104B, CC

Consumer Returns Management in Retailing Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Sustainable Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Guangzhi Shang, Assistant Professor, Florida State University, College of Business, RBB354, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, United States of America, gshang@business.fsu.edu 1 - Does a Better Customer Experience Reduce Consumer Returns? An Empirical Study using Data Analytics Necati Ertekin, Texas A&M University, Mays Business School, College Station, TX, 77840, United States of America, nertekin@mays.tamu.edu, Michael Ketzenberg, Gregory Heim This study contributes to the understanding of consumer return behavior by examining the association between in-store customer experience (i.e. product quality, service quality, and customer satisfaction) during a purchase and a subsequent return. Our analysis reveals surprising findings for retailers. For instance, we demonstrate that retail efforts such as increasing salespeople competence and improving store environment that are so long believed to prevent returns may indeed induce returns. 2 - Intertemporal Pricing and Return Policies in the Presence of Strategic Consumers Wenbo Selina Cai, Assistant Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology, cai@njit.edu, Ying-ju Chen Pricing and return policies are crucial decisions that affect online retailers’ profitability when dealing with strategic consumers. We develop a model that considers heterogeneous consumer valuations, valuation uncertainties, and strategic purchasing behaviors, and derive the optimal joint pricing and return policy for a retailer in a dynamic pricing framework. We discuss the implications of a generous return policy, and show that returns can help retailers facilitate market segmentation. 3 - An Empirical Investigation of Return Drivers: Reducing Consumer Returns in the Era of Generous Refunds Guangzhi Shang, Assistant Professor, Florida State University, College of Business, RBB354, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, United States of America, gshang@business.fsu.edu, Mark Ferguson, Michael Galbreth We empirically study drivers of whether and when to return. Our results informs retailers’ return management along two dimensions: 1) how to target buyer assistance, and 2) how to customize return time window.

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