2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
450
WC74
Legends B- Omni
Ops Mgt/Marketing III
Contributed Session
Chair: Xiuli He, Associate Professor, UNC-Charlotte, 1207 Doughty
Place, Sugar Land, TX, 77479, United States,
1 - Selling To An Off-price Retailer To Ration Inventory For
Strategic Consumers
Moutaz J Khouja, University of North Carolina-Charlotte,
BISOM Department, College of Business, Charlotte, NC, 28223,
United States, , Jing Zhou, Xin Liu
Strategic consumers are likely to delay purchases when retailers have large
inventory. Retailers can reduce this inventory by selling some of it to off-price
retailers. If an off-price retailer has many bargain-hunters, such a strategy may be
beneficial to the retailer in mitigating the effects of strategic consumer behavior.
2 - Multi-agent Salesforce Compensation With Supply
Chain Considerations
Sandra Transchel, Kuehne Logistics University, Grosser Grasbrook
17, Hamburg, 20457, Germany,
Kristoph Kurt Reinhard Ullrich, Ruud Teunter, Jasper Veldman
We study the impact of limited inventory on sales force incentive contracts and
the induced efforts of firms which employ multiple sales agents. We show that if
demand is censored by inventory levels, pooling inventory may lead to a free-
riding problem of the sales agents. This implies that, on the one hand, firms face
reduced cost by pooling inventory, but on the other hand, they may face lower
sales because of lower efforts exerted by their agents.
3 - Vegetable Equity: Insights From Agri-food Supply Chain
Innovations In Emerging Economies
Fei Qin, Assistant Professor, Oakland University, 2200 North
Squirrel Road, Rochester, MI, 48309-4401, United States,
, Saibal Ray, Mehmet Gumus
We build an analytical model to examine the impact of VK Agri-food supply chain
intervention on fruits and fresh vegetables prices and social welfares. We find that
while a supply chain innovation like VK may be good for consumers or even for
bringing more farmers into the market system, one of its main goals - improving
the financial condition of all farmers - may not be true. We explore sample data to
test a list of hypotheses, and in this regard, elicit the impact of VK intervention on
the prices and sales as well as farmer’s welfare.
4 - Personal Fabrication
Nagarajan Sethuraman, PhD Student, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, United States,
,
Ali Kemal Parlakturk, Jayashankar M Swaminathan
We study the idea of personal fabrication and its implications for firms. We
propose and analyze a mechanism, through which, firms can benefit from
personal fabrication.
5 - Product Quality Strategy With Consumer Heterogeneity Of
Technology Platform
Xiuli He, Associate Professor, UNC-Charlotte, 1207 Doughty Place,
Sugar Land, TX, 77479, United States, , Yong Zha,
Subodha Kumar, Lu Zhang
We study the firm’s optimal quality strategy when selling a base product and a
complementary platform. We consider two cost structures of platform quality and
two consumer valuations along the platform quality.
WC75
Legends C- Omni
Economics III
Contributed Session
Chair: Dowon Kim, KAIST, Guseng Dong, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of,
1 - Optimal Subsidy And Tax Policy And Consumer
Environmental Awareness
Jie Zhang, University of Texas, 701 South West Street, Arlington,
TX, 76019, United States, Linghong Zhang
This paper investigates the optimal subsidy and tax policies in response to
different consumer environmental awareness (CEA) and firms’ product selection
(generic, green or both), plus quality and pricing decisions. We investigated all the
equilibria under different policy combinations and derived the analytical and
numerical solutions.
2 - The Effect Of Agricultural Subsidy Policy on The Land Scale
Management Of Farmers
Xuechen Meng, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai,
China,
Based on the Nerlove adaptive expectations model and the dynamic panel GMM
model, this paper studies the impact of subsidies on farming land scale operation.
Results show that when controlling for other factors that influence the conditions
of land scale, agricultural subsidies only has a slight positive impact on expanding
land scale, the effect mainly reflects in the main producing area while negative on
the sales areas. This paper also examines the impact of main producing subsidies
on difference kinds of crops and finds that the effect of subsidies on wheat
plantings are greater than corn and rice, indicating the importance of precisely
target subsidies in the future.
3 - Discounting Long-term Public Investments Under
Model Uncertainty
Dowon Kim, PhD Student, KAIST, Guseng Dong, Daejeon, Korea,
Republic of, Kyoung-Kuk Kim,
Jiwoong Lee
This paper proposes a new approach to deal with social discount rates for long-
term public investments. Using the recursive-utility framework, we explicitly
account for consumption inequality aversion, risk aversion, and ambiguity
aversion. In addition, the proposed approach overcomes limitations of two-period
models in the literature. As an illustration, estimation results are presented based
on binomial lattices and IPCC emission scenarios data.
WC76
Legends D- Omni
Applied Probability III
Contributed Session
Chair: Kaan Kuzu, Assistant Professor, Univ of Wisconsin - Milwaukee,
Sheldon B Lubar School of Business, P.O. Box 742, Milwaukee, WI,
53201-0742, United States,
1 - Non Stationary Gaussian Process Bandits
Ankur Mani, University of Minnesota, 808 Berry St. Apt. 410, St.
Paul, MN, 55114, United States, , Ashish Kapoor,
Eric Horvitz
We study the non-stationary version of the correlated multi-armed bandit
problem where the correlations between the rewards from different bandits and
at different times are captured by a Gaussian process. We identify the rate at
which the optimal regret grows and provide an algorithm that achieves the
optimal regret.
2 - Valuing Optimal Switching Options With The
Moving-boundary Method
Arun Chockalingam, Eindhoven University of Technology,
Hoog Gagel 62, Eindhoven, 5611BG, Netherlands,
Taimaz Soltani, Shaunak Dabadghao,
Jan C Fransoo
The contribution of this paper is extending the Moving Boundary Method to
tackle the optimal-switching problem. The Moving Boundary Method has been
successfully applied to optimal-stopping problems. Optimal-switching problems
can be thought of as sequences of optimal-stopping problems and possess
complicating features, making an extension of the Moving-Boundary Method to
tackle such problems non-trivial. The method is then applied to problems in the
sourcing and energy domains.
3 - Random Dimensional Spaces
Kemal Gursoy, Professor, Rutgers University,
100 Rockafeller Road, Room 5146, Piscataway, NJ, 08854,
United States,
In this work, a probability law for random dimensional spaces was investigated.
Where points could appear and disappear randomly. Consequently, the dimension
of a space would be continuously translated from a real number to another one.
Therefore, the main interest is to identify persistent properties of the space, under
all possible continuous transformations.
4 - Analysis Of Customer Abandonment In Ticket Queues:
A Bayesian Approach
Kaan Kuzu, Assistant Professor, Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
Sheldon B Lubar School of Business, P.O. Box 742, Milwaukee,
WI, 53201-0742, United States, , Refik Soyer
Ticket queue systems collect interval censored data for customer abandonment.
The abandonment of a customer is only realized when the ticket for that
customer is called for service and the customer does not show up. We present a
modulated Poisson process model to analyze customer abandonments in ticket
queues. A Bayesian analysis of the model is developed considering covariates
such as branch and weekday. The proposed model and the methodology are
implemented using real ticket queue data. We show the heterogeneity in
customer abandonments and provide insights on server allocation policies.
WC74