Working Papers

After reformulating Clark and Scarf’s (1960) classical serial multi-echelon model so that the lead time between adjacent echelons is one week (period), the option to expedite between each resulting echelon is added. Thus, each week requires a…

Some firms, particularly in high-tech, appear to view technology and cost leadership as separate and distinct ways of achieving high profiles within a given product market. In contrast, we develop a model of technology competition suggesting that…

This paper studies time-based competition in imperfect securities markets, linking IT investment decisions, information processing delays and trading strategies. At the IT investment stage, traders trade off the cost of IT against their…

World-Class Manufacturing has received a great deal of attention in the past few years, drawing largely on successful Japanese manufacturing practices. There has also been a separate explosion in the use of conjoint analysis to determine customer…

We consider a manufacturer introducing a new product into a distribution channel and examine what wholesale price should be charged. The setting in many ways is simple. The channel is abbreviated with the manufacturer selling directly to the…

We explore the critical linkages between attributes of manufacturing strategy and attributes of marketing strategy. Generic linkages drawn from a significant managerial sample are presented and discussed. A second, independent sample is used to…

Recent tests of the capital asset pricing model by Fama and French (1992) showed that there is no significant relationship between the average return and systematic risk of common stocks. We propose two econometric methods to improve the…

We analyze single parameter process design problems that typically entail minimizing the sum of convex and concave functions. We transform such problems into a tractable form, and obtain sharp characterizations of the original problem. Solution…

The growth in information systems budgets and in their primary components, hardware and software effort, are analyzed empirically. It is demonstrated that while a large component of the growth is due to technology related factors, these…

Stereotypically, marketing is mainly concerned about satisfying customers and manufacturing is mainly interested in factory efficiency. Using the principal-agent (agency) paradigm, which assumes that the marketing and manufacturing managers of…

Abstract not available.

This paper considers single-item, periodic review inventory systems with linear procurement, holding and shortage costs, and immediate delivery. Immediate stock disposal with a linear disposal fee may or may not be an option. The demand in each…

This paper examines the magnitude of price changes following entry into markets for 30 undifferentiated chemical products. On average, prices fell by about 6% in years when entry occurred. Price cuts were roughly twice as deep when the entrant…

A partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) is a sequential decision problem where information concerning parameters of interest is incomplete, and possible actions include sampling, surveying, or otherwise collecting additional…

Negative voting occurs when voters respond more strongly to political actions or outcomes they oppose than to comparable actions or outcomes they favor. This paper discusses the possibility that negative voting is an artifact. We develop a simple…

This note points out an error in the only published algorithm for exactsolution of partially observed Markov decision processes. The major insights and contributions of the original work remain intact, and the error can be remedied, albeit at…

Porteus, and Rosenblatt and Lee have recently developed models in which process quality and lot sizing interact. Lot sizes should be reduced to compensate for poor quality. Investment in setup time reduction leads to even smaller lot sizes and…

While in school, Stanford MBA students were given a test battery chosen to predict managerial potential. This battery included several instruments that attempt to measure leadership, Leadership Opinion questionnaire, McClelland’s Test of…

A capacity expansion problem is one of choosing the timing, location, and sizing of productive capacity to respond to demand forecasts at minimum cost. Capacity expansion models for realistic problems tend to be too large for present methods that…

This paper introduces some methods for anticipating the difference between optimal harvesting strategies in a fishery model with stochastic recruitment and for the analogous deterministic model with recruitment equal to its expected value. The…