Informs 2015

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INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015
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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,
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,
, 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,
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,
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,
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,
, 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, ,
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,
, 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.
TB50
50-Room 106A, CC
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,
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
Liying Mu, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware,
20 Orchard Rd, Newark, 19716, United States of America,
Milind Dawande, Xianjun Geng,
Vijay Mookerjee
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,
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,
, 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, ,
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