Informs 2015

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INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015
466
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,
1 - Fulfillment Service in Online Marketplaces
Wenjing Shen, Drexel University, 3220 Market Street,
Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States of America,
Gangshu Cai, Xiangfeng Chen
Dominant online retailers,such as and 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, ,
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,
, 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,
Co-Chair: Hossein Abouee Mehrizi, University of Waterloo, 200
University Avenue West, Department of Management Sciences,
waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada,
1 - Long Term Surgery Planning and Scheduling
Maya Bam, University of Michigan, 1205 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor,
MI, 48109, United States of America, ,
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
Meilin Zhang, PhD Candidate, NUS Business School, BIZ 2
Building, 1 Business Link, Singapore 117592, Singapore, Si,
117592, Singapore, , 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,
1255 Western Road, London, ON, N6G0N1, Canada,
Jonathan Patrick, Antoine Sauré
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, ,
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,
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,
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, 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,
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,
, 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.
WD40