Business Commons^™

Decision-Making In Simultaneous Games: Reviewing The Past For The Future, Mohsen Ahmadian, Ehsan Elahi, Roger Blake

Mohsen Ahmadian

Emerging Research Institutions' Technology Transfer Supply Chain Networks' Sustainability: Budget Resource Planning Tool Development, Clovia Hamilton

Clovia Hamilton

Hbcu Technology Transfer Supply Chain Networks’ Sustainability - Budget Resource Planning Tool Development.Pdf, Clovia Hamilton

Clovia Hamilton

Organizational Performance In Services, Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast

Virginia Doellgast

The question of performance in service activities and occupations is important for several reasons. First, over two-thirds of employment in advanced economies is in service activities. Second, productivity growth in services is historically low, lagging far behind manufacturing, and as a result, wages in production-level service jobs remain low. In addition, labor costs in service activities are often over 50% of total costs, whereas in manufacturing they have fallen to less than 25% of costs. This raises the question of whether management practices that have improved performance in manufacturing, such as investment in the skills and training of the workforce, …

A Supply Chain Coordination Mechanism For Common Items Subject To Failure In The Electronics, Defense, And Medical Industries, Mikhail M. Sher, Seung-Lae Kim, Avijit Banerjee, Michael Paz

Michael Paz

Improved production processes, particularly miniaturization, have led to the development and use of non-reworkable items subject to failure in modern production environments. Coordinating supply chains for these items requires cooperation between suppliers and buyers in order to balance ordering/setup and holding costs among system partners. In this paper, we first determine optimal inventory policies for both the supplier and buyer. We then apply the bisection method to develop a mechanism which uses a common replenishment time to coordinate a supply chain consisting of a single supplier and n buyers. By utilizing this optimization framework, we minimize total system-wide costs and …

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

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. …

Factor Market Myopia: A Driver Of Factor Market Revalry, Peter Ralston, Steven Lemay, Rose Opengart

Peter Ralston