2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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2 - Question-and-answer Forums For Product Support:
Crowdsourcing Service To Customers
Konstantinos Stouras, INSEAD,
Online product support forums where customers can post complaints and
questions, or report issues about a product or service of a firm abound. A large
number of companies choose to crowdsource their product and service support
back to their customers, employing a few dedicated service operators. We
characterize the equilibrium behavior of such a novel business model for service
and compare it with a call center model.
3 - Scale, Scope And Hospital Productivity: An Empirical Study Of
Volume Spillovers Across Hospital Services
Michael Freeman, Judge Business School, University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
Nicos Savva, Stefan Scholtes
Demand pressures mean that hospitals are increasingly getting bigger (i.e. treat
more patients per year) and also more complex (i.e. see patients with more
diverse care needs). Although prior work has shown that increased volume is
positively associated with patient outcomes, the relationship between volume,
complexity, and costs is less-well understood. This paper uses a detailed panel of
130 hospitals in England over a period of nine years to examine the relationship
between scale and costs in hospitals by investigating spillovers between treating
together related (e.g. same service line, same degree of urgency) and unrelated
(e.g. different service lines, different urgency) activity.
4 - Finding A Needle In A Haystack: The Effects Of Searching And
Learning On Pick-worker Performance
Robert Batt, Assistant Professor, Wisconsin School of Business,
UW-Madison, Madison, WI, United States,
Santiago Gallino
We use a unique dataset from an online apparel retailer to estimate the
magnitude of intra-bin search time and what operational and behavioral factors
affect it. We find that intra-bin search time increases with both the number of
items in the bin and the density of items in the bin (i.e., items per foot). Further,
we find that the deleterious effects of bin load and density are attenuated by
worker experience. More experienced workers are less impacted by bin load and
density than are less experienced workers. We use simulation to show that
incorporating these bin load and experience effects into pick assignments and
routing can lead to meaningful improvements in pick times.
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202C-MCC
Supply Chain Finance and Risk Management
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt, iFORM
Sponsored Session
Chair: Wei Luo, IESE Business School, Av. Pearson 21, Barcelona, n/a,
Spain,
1 - The Effectiveness Of Supplier Buy Back Finance: Evidence From
Chinese Automobile Industry
Weiming Zhu, University of Maryland,
Facing a budget-constrained buyer, a novel approach for large suppliers is
adopting buy-back financing schemes to relieve their downstream partners and
reduce channel costs. Through counterfactual analysis, we analyze the efficiency
of these financing schemes. We find that such contract agreements can improve
channel efficiency over traditional financing methods.
2 - Suppliers As Liquidity Providers
Panos Markou, IE Business School,
, Daniel S Corsten, Reint Gropp
Using a data set of private and public French firms and their suppliers, we
examine how supplier financial constraint affects buyer cash holdings. When
external financing is costly or unavailable, firms rely on their suppliers for backup
liquidity, freeing up cash. Using matching estimators, we show that constrained
buyers with unconstrained suppliers hold less cash than buyers with constrained
suppliers. This effect persists during the financial crisis, highlighting that suppliers
may be viable liquidity sources when banks are not. Finally, not only do buyers
with unconstrained suppliers hold less cash, but they adjust cash holdings
downwards following a supplier IPO.
3 - Financial Fluctuations Through Dynamic Networks
Stefano Nasini, IESEG School of Management, Paris/Lille, France,
Mireia Giné, Miguel Antón
Decisions and outcomes of listed enterprises are strongly related by different types
of associations, such as supply-chain, competition and partnership. In the context
of financial stock markets, we introduce a network-based econometric framework
to explain cross-section dependencies of stock prices. After a detailed analysis of
the proposed methodology, estimation and forecast are carried out, based on the
COMPUSTAT data set (with information about supply-chain, competition and
partnership between U.S. listed companies). The inclusion of these pairwise
dependencies results in a substantial improvement of the predictive power, in
comparison with the standard auto-regressive approach.
4 - Financing Sellers Via E-commerce Platform In The Presence Of
Seller Competition
Long Ren, Tsinghua University, ,
Lingxiu Dong
Small-business sellers selling products via e-retailing platforms (e.g.,
eBay, Taobao) operate under consignment-revenue-sharing
(commission) contracts, under which the seller decides his product portfolio,
inventory, and selling price. Many of those sellers face capital constraints that
limit their ability to build inventory, expand product offerings. We investigate the
effect of e-commerce platform backed financing on sellers’ operational decisions
and the competition landscape.
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203A-MCC
Revenue Mgt, Pricing I
Contributed Session
Chair: Syed Asif Raza, Qatar University, College of Business and
Economics, Doha, 2713, Qatar,
1 - Reputation-based Pricing In E-commerce Retailing
Renato E de Matta, Associate Professor, University of Iowa,
2360 Mulberry Street, Coralville, IA, 52241, United States,
, Timothy Joe Lowe, Dengfeng Zhang
We examine a revenue management problem involving an online seller of a
seasonal product in an e-commerce setting where consumers are sensitive to both
price and seller service rating. This rating is the aggregated consumer perception
of service quality and is used as a reputation indicator in setting prices. Using a
Markov decision process to model the problem over a finite horizon, we examine
the impact of changes in seller service rating and consumer heterogeneity on the
seller’s optimal pricing policy and expected revenues. Using simulated market
settings, we validate our model and compare our pricing policy with two other
competing policies.
2 - Research On Pricing Decision Of Remanufacturing Considering
Product Disassemblability And Recycling Quality Uncertainty
Juhong Gao, Dr., College of Management and Economics, Tianjin
University, Building 25-A No.92 Weijin Road, Nankai, Tianjin,
300072, China, , Mengmeng Li
In this paper, the target of CLSC is to realize the members’ profit maximization
considering product disassemblability and recycling quality uncertainty. The four
different remanufacturing models have been analyzed and the coordination
mechanism has been introduced, in which the separation and cooperation model
of OEM and IO. Research shows the members obtain less profit when both of
OEM and IO are involved into remanufacturing. And OEM’s profit is higher in
centralized decision; IO still prefers to give up part of the profit and to participate
in the cooperation model considering that IO is more easily to be driven out of
remanufacturing market by OEM in decentralized decision.
3 - Dynamic Pricing In China’s Largest E-retailer
Dongdong Ge, Professor, Shanghai University of Finance and
Economics, School of Information management and eng, 777
Guoding Road, Shanghai, 200433, China,
In China’s largest E-Retailer JingDong ), there are 20 millions SKUs on
sale and 3 million orders made every day. Dynamic pricing in this gigantic system
has been recognized a vital issue in company’s revenue management operations.
In this talk, we briefly introduce our data-driven optimization models and
findings with . We also report our A/B test result, which shows a great
improvement in GMV/GP.
4 - Economic Order Quantity Models For Joint Pricing And Greening
Effort Decisions With Discounts
Syed Asif Raza, Qatar University, College of Business and
Economics, Doha, 2713, Qatar,
Environmental protection and greening concerns have gained greatly emphasis
both at the procedures and consumers alike. Nowadays, customers are often
willing to pay a premium for environmentally friendly products, however, the
investment in greening effort by a firm must yield profitability to a firm. This
required the use of contemporary tools from Revenue Management (RM) and
pricing. Economic order quantity (EOQ) models are among the most studied in
inventory management context. This paper develops EOQ models with joint
pricing, greening effort (investment) decision in an RM context. Efficient solution
procedure is also proposed to consider the quantity discount in the EOQ models
analysis.
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