Informs 2015

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INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015
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2 - Motivating Process Compliance through Electronic Monitoring
Bradley Staats, Associate Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill, United
States of America,
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, , 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, , 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.
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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,
1 - Coopeting for Sustainability
Karthik Murali, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL,
United States of America, ,
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, ,
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, , 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
St. NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, United States of America,
, Ravi Subramanian,
Manpreet Hora
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.
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48-Room 105A, CC
Supply Chain Risk Management
Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/iFORM
Sponsored Session
Chair: Nikolaos Trichakis, HBS,
1 - Learning from Precursors to Disasters: The Role of Incentives
Heikki Peura, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London,
United Kingdom, , 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,
, 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,
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.
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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,
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,
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,
, 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.
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