a market discovery algorithm to estimate a general class of nonparametric choice models we propose an approach for estimating customer preferences for a set of substitutable products using only sales transactions and product availability data the underlying demand framework combines a general nonparametric discrete choice model with a bernoulli process of arrivals over time the choice model is defined by a discrete probability mass function pmf on a set of possible preference rankings of alternatives and it is compatible with any random utility model an arriving customer is assumed to purchase the available option that ranks highest in her preference list the problem we address is how to jointly estimate the arrival rate and the pmf of the rank based choice model under a maximum likelihood criterion since the potential number of customer types is factorial we propose a market discovery algorithm that starts with a parsimonious set of types and enlarge it by automatically generating new types that increase the likelihood value numerical experiments confirm the potential of our proposal for a realistic data set in the hospitality industry our approach improves the root mean square errors between predicted and observed purchases computed under independent demand model estimates by 67 to 93 this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management

optimal growth with many consumers abstract a method is described for constructing all pareto optimal allocations for a dynamic economy with many heterogeneous consumers under certainty in which both the technology and consumer preferences are recursive but preferences need not be additively separable over time optimal perfect foresight competitive equilibrium allocations are obtained through the study of a dynamic program for an economy with one consumption good sufficient conditions are given for the existence of a unique interior stationary distribution of consumption and wealth for a two person exchange economy sufficient conditions are given for the global asymptotic stability of the unique interior stationary point

sustainability in electrical and electronic equipment closed loop supply chains a system dynamics approach abstract in this paper we examine the impact of ecological motivation and technological innovations on the long term behavior of a closed loop supply chain with recycling activities ecological motivation manifests through legislation and green image factor whereas technological innovations manifest through design for environment we adopt system dynamics methodology applied to many environmental systems seeking long term gains the developed model is implemented to a real world supply chain of electrical equipment in greece numerical analysis illustrates the factors concerned like the delay of the legislation enforcement to achieve a sustainable future through non renewable resources and landfill preservation

a probabilistic choice model for market segmentation and elasticity structure marketing scholars commonly characterize market structure by studying the patterns of substitution implied by brand switching though the approach is useful it typically ignores the destabilizing

balanced growth consistent recursive utility abstract koopmans s recursive utility has proven useful in a number of dynamic modelling contexts nonetheless recursive utility has not made significant inroads into what one would expect to be a natural haven models of balanced growth whether exogenous or endogenous mainly this is due to the dearth of interesting recursive utilities which are consistent with balanced growth in this paper i provide conditions on the aggregator which guarantee the existence of a recursive utility function which is consistent with balanced growth the result in turn shows how a family of such utility functions may be constructed i also provide a generalization of jones and manuelli s theorem on the existence of optimal endogenous growth

a unified theory of the dynamics of closed loop supply chains we investigate the dynamics of a closed loop supply chain with first order auto regressive ar 1 demand and return processes we assume these two processes are cross correlated the remanufacturing process is subject to a random triage yield remanufactured products are considered as goodas new and used to partially satisfy market demand newly manufactured products make up the remainder we derive the optimal linear policy in our closed loop supply chain setting to minimise the manufacturer s inventory costs we show that the lead time paradox can emerge in many cases in particular the auto and cross correlation parameters and variances of the error terms in the demand and the returns as well as the remanufacturing lead time all influence the existence of the lead time paradox finally we propose managerial recommendations for manufacturers

reprint efficient flexible long term capacity planning for optimal sustainability dimensions performance of reverse logistics social responsibility a system dynamics approach abstract product lifecycle uncertainties in closed loop supply chains clscs are costly and frequently unavoidable so the aim of this paper is to develop efficient flexible long term capacity planning policy for clscs that considers social responsibility or a supply chain with reverse logistics social responsibility rlsr this aim is to answer an important research question on how to tackle the lifecycle with its inherited uncertainty to achieve optimal sustainability dimensions performance here a single product system dynamics sd model of the supply chain with rlsr is used this sd model considers interrelated sustainability dimensions and adopts the product lifecycle with its inherited uncertainties such as the length of the product lifecycle pattern of the product lifecycle and residence index finally a mathematical model of the developed policy is constructed and a simplified non linear multi objective algorithm is proposed to solve this mathematical model in addition taguchi design is used to minimize the number of simulations needed in the numerical experiment the findings of this study show that the developed policy could be used to tackle the lifecycle with its inherited uncertainty to optimize the sustainability dimensions performance these findings have some limitations however the findings underscore this paper s contribution to the relatively limited but important academic knowledge on capacity planning development for research on social responsibility issues in clscs in practice the results will give managers a better understanding of how to tackle product lifecycle uncertainties in rlsr and will therefore lead to better capacity planning to achieve optimal sustainability dimensions performance

an investigation of lead time effects in manufacturing remanufacturing systems under simple push and pull control strategies in this paper we extend the push and pull control strategies defined by van der laan et al e a van der laan m salomon r dekker production planning and inventory control for remanufacturable durable products working paper 9531 a econometric institute erasmus university rotterdam the netherlands 1995 to evaluate numerically the effects of lead time duration and lead time variability on total expected costs in production inventory systems with remanufacturing although both strategies are non optimal they are relatively easy to analyse numerically and more importantly they are actually used in practice the most important outcomes of the study are that for both control strategies i manufacturing lead times have a larger influence on system costs than remanufacturing lead times ii a larger remanufacturing lead time may sometimes result in a cost decrease and iii a larger variability in the manufacturing lead time may sometimes result in a cost decrease

structural estimation of the effect of out of stocks we develop a structural demand model that endogenously captures the effect of out of stocks on customer choice by simulating a time varying set of available alternatives our estimation method uses store level data on sales and partial information on product availability our model allows for flexible substitution patterns which are based on utility maximization principles and can accommodate categorical and continuous product characteristics the methodology can be applied to data from multiple markets and in categories with a relatively large number of alternatives slow moving products and frequent out of stocks unlike many existing approaches in addition we illustrate how the model can be used to assist the decisions of a store manager in two ways first we show how to quantify the lost sales induced by out of stock products second we provide insights on the financial consequences of out of stocks and suggest price promotion policies that can be used to help mitigate their negative economic impact which run counter to simple commonly used heuristics

research note structural demand estimation with varying product availability this paper develops a model that extends the traditional aggregate discrete choice based demand model e g berry et al 1995 to account for varying levels of product availability in cases where not all products are available at every consumer shopping trip the observed market share is a convolution of two factors consumer preferences and the availability of the product in stores failing to account for the varying degree of availability would produce incorrect estimates of the demand parameters the proposed model uses information on aggregate availability to simulate the potential assortments that consumers may face in a given shopping trip the model parameters are estimated by simulating potential product assortment vectors by drawing multivariate bernoulli vectors consistent with the observed aggregate level of availability the model is applied to the uk chocolate confectionery market focusing on the convenience store channel we compare the parameter estimates to those obtained from not accounting for varying availability and analyze some of the substantive implications

measuring market power in the ready to eat cereal industry the ready to eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration high price cost margins large advertising to sales ratios and numerous introductions of new products previous researchers have concluded that the ready to eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition this paper empirically examines this conclusion in particular i estimate price cost margins but more importantly i am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources i that which is due to product differentiation ii that which is due to multi product firm pricing and iii that due to potential price collusion the results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal the first two effects explain most of the observed price cost margins i conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior despite the high price cost margins leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality it is these two factors that lead to high price cost margins

market roll out and retailer adoption for new brands this paper proposes a descriptive model of the spatial and temporal evolution of retail distribution for new packaged goods the distribution model postulates separate processes for local market entry by manufacturers and adoption by retailers given entry of special interest is whether retail adoption occurs along a competitive network with retailers as nodes and overlapping trade areas of these retailers as links the model is calibrated on data covering the introduction of two very successful new brands in the frozen pizza category for these brands manufacturers sequentially enter markets based on spatial proximity to markets already entered spatial evolution and on whether chains in these markets adopted previously elsewhere market selection a retail chain adopts new brands based on the adoption timing of competing chains within its trade territory competitive contagion and on the fraction of its trade area in which the new brand is available trade area coverage the effects of market selection and of trade area coverage create dependencies between market entry and retail adoption because of these dependencies the attraction of a particular market as a lead market depends on its location in the geographic structure of the u s retail trade

closed loop supply chains what reverse logistics factors influence performance this paper analyses the inventory and order flow dynamics in closed loop supply chains clscs in this kind of supply chains the reverse flow of materials entering the system for recycling purposes complicates the way in which inventories should be managed and replenishment policies should be designed specifically we analyse the relationships between some reverse logistics factors remanufacturing lead time return rate of recycled products reverse order policy and number of supply chain tiers on the order and inventory variance amplification we firstly perform a systematic literature review of the related studies secondly by adopting a difference equation math approach and design of experiment we perform a robust what if analysis of a clsc under a variety of operational and market conditions results show that ceteris paribus clsc outperforms a forward supply chain both in mono echelon and multi echelon structures and under both stationary and turbulent market demands furthermore reducing remanufacturing lead time and promoting information transparency may be crucial to improve clsc dynamics finally we use the research findings to provide interesting managerial consideration about how to reduce unnecessary operational members costs

the rate of time preference and dynamic economic analysis strong restrictions on the structure of preferences are a central feature in the received theory of intertemporal allocation in fact most of the modern literature concerned with capital theoretic problems represents preferences by a functional in which an additive utility function is discounted by a constant rate of time preference this specification is attractive because it is analytically tractable in dynamic models and it clearly delineates how tastes and opportunities interact to determine an economy s household s paths of consumption and capital formation however its rigid structure constancy of time preference severely limits the conclusions and explanatory power of the corresponding models this paper considers a class of utility functionals in continuous time which have the appealing feature that the rate of time preference depends systematically on an index of aggregate future consumption the more flexible structure embodied in these functionals leads to important generalizations and

revenue sharing coordination in reverse logistics a reverse supply chain as a post consumption activity aims at extracting value from products at the end of their life cycle it could be comprised of reusing refurbishing remanufacturing and recycling activities in this paper we revisit the issue of revenue sharing in reverse supply chains to formulate the decision problems of coordinating parties manufacturer and retailer the coordination is formed in a dynamic setting where a feedback relationship exists between the return incentive policy of the retailer and the revenue sharing incentive strategy of the manufacturer to model this process we have adopted the use of a system dynamics sd approach sd is well suited for studying the behavior of complex systems over time and where internal feedbacks and delays exist we first identify pareto optimal solutions for individual players and from environmental perspectives of landfill diversion and carbon offset we then focus on revenue sharing as a widely practiced coordination scheme in reverse supply chains it resembles a leader follower stackelberg strategic decision making game with an equilibrium solution that yields lower performance for environmental criteria in this context we investigate if how a revenue sharing mechanism can be coordinated to achieve a higher environmental performance

structural analysis of manufacturer pricing in the presence of a strategic retailer consumer goods manufacturers usually sell their brands to consumers through common independent retailers theoretical research on such channel structures has analyzed the optimal behavior of channel members under alternative assumptions of manufacturer retailer interaction vertical strategic interaction research in empirical industrial organization has focused on analyzing the competitive interactions between manufacturers horizontal strategic interaction decision support systems have made various assumptions about retailer pricing rules e g constant markup category profit maximization the appropriateness of such assumptions about strategic behavior for any specific market however is an empirical question this paper therefore empirically infers 1 the vertical strategic interaction vsi between manufacturers and retailer 2 the horizontal strategic interaction hsi between manufacturers simultaneously with the vsi and 3 the pricing rule used by a retailer the approach is particularly appealing because it can be used with widely available scanner data where there is no information on wholesale prices researchers usually have no access to wholesale prices even manufacturers who have access to their own wholesale prices usually have limited information on competitors wholesale prices in the absence of wholesale prices we derive formulae for wholesale prices using game theoretic solution techniques under the specific assumptions of vertical and horizontal strategic interaction and retailer pricing rules we then embed the formulae for wholesale prices into the estimation equations while our empirical illustration is using scanner data without wholesale prices the model itself can be applied when wholesale prices are available early research on the inference of hsi among manufacturers in setting wholesale prices using scanner data e g kadiyali et al 1996 1999 made the simplifying assumption that retailers charge a constant margin this assumption enabled them to infer wholesale prices and analyze competitive interactions between manufacturers in this paper we show that this model is econometrically identical to a model that measures retail price coordination across brands hence the inferred cooperation among manufacturers could be exaggerated by the coordinated pricing category management done by the retailer we find empirical support for this argument this highlights the need to properly model and infer vsi simultaneously to accurately estimate the hsi when using data at the retail level functional forms of demand have been evaluated in terms of the fit of the model to sales data but recent theoretical research on channels lee and staelin 1997 tyagi 1999 has shown that the functional form has serious implications for strategic behavior such as retail passthrough while the logit and linear model implies equilibrium passthrough of less than 100 lee and staelin call this vertical strategic substitute vss the multiplicative model implies optimal passthrough of greater than 100 vertical strategic complement vsc because passthrough rates on promotions have been found to be below or above 100 chevalier and curhan 1976 armstrong 1991 we empirically test the appropriateness of the logit vss and the multiplicative vsc functional form for the data we perform our analysis in the yogurt and peanut butter categories for the two biggest stores in a local market we found that the vss implications of the logit fit the data better than the multiplicative model we also find that for both categories the best fitting model is one in which 1 the retailer maximizes category profits 2 the vsi is manufacturer stackelberg and 3 manufacturer pricing hsi is tacitly collusive the fact that the retailer maximizes category profits is consistent with theoretical expectations the inference that the vsi is manufacturer stackelberg reflects the institutional reality of the timing of the game retailers set their retail prices after manufacturers set their wholesale prices note that in the stores and product categories that we analyze the two manufacturers own the dominant brands with combined market shares of about 82 in the yogurt market and 65 in the peanut butter market the result is also consistent with a balance of power argument in the literature the finding that manufacturer pricing is tacitly collusive is consistent with the argument that firms involved in long term competition in concentrated markets can achieve tacit collusion managers use decision support systems for promotion planning that routinely make assumptions about vsi hsi and the functional form the results from our analysis are of substantive import in judging the appropriateness of assumptions made in such decision support systems

demand estimation and ordering under censoring stock out timing is almost all you need retailers facing uncertain demand can use observed sales to update demand estimates however such learning is limited by the amount of inventory carried when demand exceeds inventory i e when a stock out event occurs a retailer in general cannot observe actual demand we propose using observations on the timing of sales occurrences in a bayesian fashion to learn about demand and we analyze this learning method for a multiperiod newsvendor setting we find that as previously shown with the use of only stock out event observations the optimal order quantity with timing observations is greater than the optimal order quantity with full demand observations we prove this result using a novel methodology from the statistics literature on comparison of experiments although the optimal over ordering with timing observations tends to be less than that with only stock out event observations in most cases we do observe cases where the opposite is true such cases correspond to high demand uncertainty and low margins where marginal learning from timing observations is significantly higher than using only a stock out event in an extensive numerical study we find that on average and with respect to uncensored demand observations the use of timing observations eliminates 76 1 of the loss in expected profit from using only stock out event observations we show that for poisson and normal demand with unknown mean the proposed learning method is tractable as well as intuitively appealing the information contained in the timing of sales occurrences is fully captured by a single number the timing of stock out we also investigate checkpoint models in which the newsvendor can make observations only at predetermined times in a period and illustrate its convergence to the models with timing and stock out event observations

the impact of environmental management on firm performance environmental management has the potential to play a pivotal role in the financial performance of the firm many individuals suggest that profitability is hurt by the higher production costs of environmental management initiatives while others cite anecdotal evidence of increased profitability a theoretical model is proposed that links strong environmental management to improved perceived future financial performance as measured by stock market performance the linkage to firm performance is tested empirically using financial event methodology and archival data of firm level environmental and financial performance significant positive returns were measured for strong environmental management as indicated by environmental performance awards and significant negative returns were measured for weak environmental management as indicated by environmental crises the implicit financial market valuation of these events also was estimated cross sectional analysis of the environmental award events revealed differences for first time awards and between industries first time award announcements were associated with greater increases in market valuation although smaller increases were observed for firms in environmentally dirty industries possibly indicative of market skepticism this linkage between environmental management and financial performance can be used by both researchers and practitioners as one measure of the benefits experienced by industry leaders and as one criterion against which to measure investment alternatives

real time identification of mean retention time and end of life rate in cyclic manufacturing used in predicting demand and new orders for shelf stock replacement and in inventory planning the mean retention time mrt of consumer products is long established as a key production and marketing parameter higher mrts are also associated with enhanced sustainability favoring longer production consumption cycles waste prevention and resource preservation the mrt or the corresponding product stock level and the end of life eol outflow to be collected for disassembly and recycling are useful for planning efficient cyclic operations determination of stock and eol level for cyclic products is challenging however due to random stock losses and to the volatile and distributed nature of returns and eol exit actuary science methods presume specific residual life distributions usually fitted ex post which may become inaccurate when applied to real production consumption cycles anchored on a recent constitutive law in cyclic manufacturing a method is presented for real time mrt and eol identification the law related mean stock and eol levels under random losses and random distributed eol exit via a simple equation without involving residual life or eol distributions or early loss history one degree of freedom still remained for both stock and eol are random and unobservable the work herein ties the remaining degree of freedom it enables sequential identification of stock and eol level using reliable and readily acquired data in a key equation obtained for the production consumption cycle adapting to varying early loss consumer take back and discard volatility it may be useful in proactive policy sizing of disassembly and recycle lines and return inventory control towards cleaner production consumption cycles

closed loop supply chains under reward penalty mechanism retailer collection and asymmetric information abstract being motivated by the issue of waste electrical and electronic equipment weee collection we consider a contract design problem for a manufacturer with entrusting the collection of weee to a retailer however the manufacturer has asymmetric information on the collection effort level of the retailer this paper designs an information screening contract for the manufacturer to obtain the information of collection effort level and the optimal decision making with several properties of contract parameters are derived the results indicate that the manufacturer would offer lower wholesale price and higher buy back price for the h type retailer while charge more franchise fee to the h type retailer considering the government intervention reward penalty mechanism rpm is developed to stimulate the asymmetric information closed loop supply chain clsc we also analyze the impacts of rpm by comparing the cases whether or not rpm is implemented the comparison results show that the rpm can lower the wholesale price and retail price meanwhile raise buy back price and collection quantity finally several numerical studies are conducted for more managerial insights

choice set heterogeneity and the role of advertising an analysis with micro and macro data abstract the authors show how to use microlevel survey data from a tracking study on brand awareness in conjunction with data on sales and advertising expenditures to improve the specification estimation and interpretation of aggregate discrete choice models of demand in a departure from the commonly made full information assumption they incorporate limited information in the form of choice sets to reflect that consumers may not be aware of all available brands at purchase time they find that both the estimated brand constants and the price coefficient are biased downward when consumer heterogeneity in choice sets is ignored these biased estimates can lead firms to make costly price setting mistakes in addition the tracking data enable the authors to identify separately two processes by which advertising influences market shares they find that advertising has a direct effect on brand awareness inclusion in choice set in addition to its effect on consumer preferences increase in utility this

demand dynamics in the seasonal goods industry an empirical analysis this study develops and estimates a dynamic model of consumer choice behavior in markets for seasonal goods where products are sold over a finite season and availability is limited in these markets retailers often use dynamic markdown policies in which an initial retail price is announced at the beginning of the season and the price is subsequently marked down as the season progresses strategic consumers face a trade off between purchasing early in the season when prices are higher but goods are available and purchasing later when prices are lower but the stockout risk is higher if the good starts providing utility as soon as it is purchased e g apparel consumers purchasing earlier in the season can also get more use from the product compared to those purchasing later our structural model incorporates three features essential for modeling the demand for seasonal goods changing prices limited availability and possible dependence of total consumption utility on the time of purchase in this model heterogeneous consumers have expectations about future prices and product availability and they strategically time their purchases we estimate the model using aggregate sales and inventory data from a fashion goods retailer the results indicate that in the fashion goods context ignoring consumers expectations about future availability or the change in total consumption utility over the season can lead to biased demand estimates we find that strategic consumers delay their purchases to take advantage of markdowns and that these strategic delays hurt the retailer s revenues retailer revenues facing strategic consumers are 9 lower than they would have been facing myopic consumers limited availability on the other hand reduces the extent of strategic delays by motivating consumers to purchase earlier we find that the impact of strategic delays on retailer revenues would have been as high as 35 if there were no stockout risk by means of counterfactual experiments we show that the highest retailer profits are achieved by offering small markdowns early in the season on the other hand given current markdown percentages the retailer can improve profits by carrying less stock as consumers accelerate purchases and purchase at higher prices when they anticipate scarcity in future periods as long as the reduction in availability is not great the profit gain from earlier higher priced sales can overcome the loss resulting from the reduction in overall sales

balanced growth consistent recursive utility and heterogeneous agents abstract the replacement of time additive separability with recursive utility greatly expands the opportunity to incorporate heterogenous agents within ramsey optimal growth models dolmas has demonstrated that there exists a class of aggregator functions that are consistent with balanced growth paths this paper demonstrates that the restrictions imposed on the aggregator functions and on preferences to ensure the existence of steady state balanced growth will also imply that capital allocations are indeterminate

strategic pricing and detailing behavior in international markets we study three determinants of the levels of price and detailing effort across geographic markets the within market response to each variable the nature of interfirm strategic interactions both within that market and across markets we empirically examine the interactions of prozac zoloft and paxil across the united states the united kingdom germany france and italy our results indicate that all three factors driving marketing mix interactions are at play in this product category the u s market is less price sensitive than the european markets detailing elasticities are comparable across the united states germany and italy while the united kingdom and france show greater elasticity for the u s market we find that almost all deviations from nash pricing and detailing levels are due to within market interactions in the u k market deviations from nash prices come about due mostly to across market interactions both with the united states as well as the rest of europe whereas deviations from nash detailing levels are mainly due to across market interactions with the united states for italy we observe that both within and across market interactions affect price and detailing levels overall the pattern of interactions makes observed prices more similar across countries than prices implied by the estimated elasticities this underscores the importance of considering within and across market interactions in developing multimarket strategy

cyclic manufacturing necessary and sufficient conditions and minimum rate policy for environmental enhancement under growth uncertainty abstract economic development and rising consumption increase pressure on the environment sustainable production and consumption face the challenge of mitigating impacts under uncertainty in economic growth trade raw material availability and prices variable consumer behavior and technological innovation necessary and sufficient conditions and a minimum rate policy for environmental enhancement under uncertainty are presented they take into account variability in sales consumption in net product and material trade and in manufacturing technology and associated impacts three main criteria are considered k1 reduced final wastes k2 reduced extraction of virgin raw materials k3 reduced impacts from manufacturing the conditions are expressed in terms of the cycle rate which is the generalization of the recycle rate and of readily monitored product flows e g overall sales key advantages of the method are discussed a simplicity and flexibility to simulate different growth conditions b a readily determined standardized rate policy leading to reduced impacts in k1 k2 and k3 it is quantitatively established that for lower wastes uncertainty in growth compels increase of the cycle rate larger than a threshold related to sales for lower virgin material extraction the threshold includes net product material trade as well reduction of manufacturing impacts requires intensification of cleaner processes with adequately lower marginal impacts in periods of economic austerity the policy may be relaxed enhancement is achieved via lower rate targets it is concluded that cleaner production becomes all the more important as reuse recycle flows increase and that such innovation may avert environmental degradation from manufacturing even under significant growth

the impact of capacity planning on product lifecycle for performance on sustainability dimensions in reverse logistics social responsibility abstract reverse logistics social responsibility rlsr is preferred as a social responsibility activity in the supply chain since it involves most of the supply chain actors who have an impact on social responsibility so here a single product system dynamics sd model of the supply chain with rlsr is developed the product lifecycle with its inherited uncertainties such as the length of the product lifecycle pattern of the product lifecycle and residence index is adopted by considering interrelated sustainability dimensions efficient flexible capacity planning is established as a policy option by considering a social responsibility fund from the premium price that is contributed by consumers the taguchi design of experiment is used for analysis of the numerical simulation finally the significance with its power is measured to show the power of the relationship between policy and uncertainty for the sustainability dimensions performance these features will be used to analyze the impact of capacity planning on product lifecycle for performance on sustainability dimensions in rlsr by using an sd approach the findings show that the policy parameters have an effect on any measured performances and uncertainties with some conditional exceptions these findings reveal three interesting facts regarding rlsr due to the considered model features first the economic performance is a result of a direct influence of policy second the environmental performance results from the indirect effect of the policy third the social performance is the performance that is hardest to influence by policy therefore the findings underscore this paper s contributions to the relatively limited academic knowledge on the examination of the impact of behavior in reverse logistics as a social responsibility due to capacity planning and the product lifecycle with its inherited uncertainties these contributions offer managers a better understanding of the relationship between capacity planning product lifecycle with its inherited uncertainties and sustainability performance this better understanding will lead to better capacity planning to tackle product lifecycle with its inherited uncertainties for sustainable rlsr

how larger demand variability may lead to lower costs in the newsvendor problem in this paper we consider the newsvendor problem intuition may lead to the hypothesis that in this stochastic inventory problem a higher demand variability results in larger variances and in higher costs in a recent paper song 1994a has proved that the intuition is correct for many demand distributions that are commonly used in practice such as for the normal distribution function however this paper shows that there exist demand distributions for which the intuition is misleading i e for which larger variances occur in combination with lower costs to characterize these demand distributions we use stochastic dominance relations

patents as options some estimates of the value of holding european patent stocks in many countries holders of patents must pay an annual renewal fee in order to keep their patents in force this paper uses data on the proportion of patents renewed and the renewal fees faced by post world war ii cohorts of patents in france the united kingdom and germany in conjunction with a model of patent holders renewal decisions to estimate the returns earned from holding patents in these countries since patents are often applied for at a nearly stage in the innovation process the model allows agents to be uncertain about the sequence of returns that will be earned if the patent is kept inforce formally then the paper presents and solves a discrete choice optimal stochastic control model derives the implications of the model on aggregate behaviour and then estimates the parameters of the model from aggregate data the estimates enable a detailed description of the evolution of the distribution of returns earned from holding patents over their life spans and calculations of both the annual returns earned from holding the patents still in force or the patent stocks in the alternative countries and the distribution of the discounted value of returns earned from holding the patents in a cohort this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of leadtime uncertainty in a simple stochastic inventory model we study a basic continuous time single item inventory model where demands form a compound poisson process and leadtimes are stochastic the performance measure of interest is the long run average cost order costs are linear so a base stock policy is optimal we focus on the behavior of the optimal base stock level in response to stochastically larger or more variable leadtimes we also investigate the behavior of the corresponding long run average costs we show that a stochastically larger leadtime requires a higher optimal base stock level however a stochastically larger leadtime may not necessarily result in a higher optimal average cost because sometimes the variability effects may dominate on the other hand a more variable leadtime always leads to a higher optimal average cost the effect of leadtime variability on optimal policies depends on the inventory cost structure a more variable leadtime requires a higher optimal base stock level if and only if the unit penalty holding cost rate is high low similar results regarding the effect of leadtime demand are also discussed in this latter case the compound poisson assumption is not necessary

design and planning of a closed loop supply chain with three way recovery and buy back offer abstract due to strict environmental legislations and competitive economics worldwide closed loop supply chain clsc management has been receiving increasing attention in order to improve the return rate of used products in this paper a recovery framework is proposed by employing buy back offer at retailer level the proposed recovery framework is integrated with an optimization model for a multi period clsc under demand and capacity uncertainty to determine optimal buy back price that needs to be offered to consumers so that the minimum collection limit set by the legislators is fulfilled as well as overall cost of the integrated system is minimized the developed model addresses the possibility of three way recovery options namely product remanufacturing component remanufacturing and raw material recovery to determine the optimal manufacturing remanufacturing and recycling quantity sensitivity analysis suggests that there is a trade off between the extra benefit generated through remanufacturing and the cost of acquisition of used products due to the employment of buy back offer a condition for the buy back offer to be simultaneously advantageous for both manufacturer and retailer under revenue sharing contract is derived a comparative study is also undertaken to examine the performance of the clsc when collection is made through buy back offer vs third party collection the proposed clsc model is further extended by adding a separate demand for remanufactured products and the performance of the initial model with the extended model is compared

recursive preferences and balanced growth abstract we study a class of utility functions that are defined recursively by an aggregator w x y where u t w c t u t 1 in single agent economies it is known that a sufficient condition for the existence of a balanced growth path is that utility should be homogenous of degree in the context of a multi agent economy we show that this restriction implies that either a balanced growth equilibrium fails to exist or all agents have the same constant discount factor we suggest a generalization of recursive preferences wherein the intertemporal utility function is time dependent within this class we establish that there may exist a balanced growth equilibrium even if agents are different

price uncertainty and consumer search a structural model of consideration set formation we offer an econometric framework that models consumer s consideration set formation as an outcome of her costly information search behavior because frequently purchased products are characterized by frequent price promotions of varying depths of discounts a consumer faces significant uncertainty about the prices of the brands the consumers engage in a fixed sample search strategy that results in their discovering the posted prices of a subset of the available brands this subset is referred to as the consumer s consideration set the proposed model is estimated using the scanner data set for liquid detergents our key empirical results are i consumers zincur significant search costs to discover the posted prices of the brands ii whereas in store displays and feature ads do not influence consumers quality perceptions of the brands they significantly reduce search costs for observing the prices of the brands iii per capita income of consumer s household significantly increases her search costs and iv the consumers price sensitivity is seriously underestimated if we were to assume that consumers get to know all the posted prices at zero cost the proposed model is also estimated for the ketchup category to enable us to do cross category comparisons of consumers price search behavior

multiple discreteness and product differentiation demand for carbonated soft drinks for several of the largest supermarket product categories such as carbonated soft drinks canned soups ready to eat cereals and cookies consumers regularly purchase assortments of products within the category consumers often purchase multiple products and multiple units of each alternative selected on a given trip this multiple discreteness violates the single unit purchase assumption of multinomial logit and probit models the misspecification of such demand models in categories exhibiting multiple discreteness would produce incorrect measures of consumer response to marketing mix variables in studying product strategy these models would lead to misleading managerial conclusions we use an alternative microeconomic model of demand for categories that exhibit the multiple discreteness problem recognizing the separation between the time of purchase and the time of consumption we model consumers purchasing bundles of goods in anticipation of a stream of consumption occasions before the next trip we apply the model to a panel of household purchases for carbonated soft drinks