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Full-Text Articles in Business
Managing Rentals With Usage-Based Loss, Vincent W. Slaugh, Bahar Biller, Sridhar R. Tayur
Managing Rentals With Usage-Based Loss, Vincent W. Slaugh, Bahar Biller, Sridhar R. Tayur
Vincent Slaugh
Motivated by new and innovative rental business models, this paper develops a novel discrete-time model of a rental operation with random loss of inventory due to customer use. The inventory level is chosen before the start of a finite rental season, and customers not immediately served are lost. Our analysis framework uses stochastic comparisons of sample paths to derive structural results that hold under good generality for demands, rental durations, and rental unit lifetimes. Considering different \recirculation" rules | i.e., which rental unit to choose to meet each demand | we prove the concavity of the expected profit function and …
The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange Improves Its Matching Process, Vincent W. Slaugh, Mustafa Akan, Onur Kesten, M. Utku Ünver
The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange Improves Its Matching Process, Vincent W. Slaugh, Mustafa Akan, Onur Kesten, M. Utku Ünver
Vincent Slaugh
The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers who represent children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and analyze child outcomes through a regression analysis of data collected over multiple years. A match recommendation spreadsheet tool implemented by PAE incorporates insights from this analysis and allows PAE managers to better utilize available information. Using a discrete-event simulation of PAE, we justify the value of a statewide adoption network and demonstrate the importance of better information about family preferences for increasing the percentage of children who are successfully adopted. …