Omega-international Journal of Management Science最新文献

{"title":"Navigating uncertainty in human interaction: A management science approach using Bayesian games in therapy","authors":"A. Mehrabi,&nbsp;R. Rahimi M.,&nbsp;A. Nikoofard","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103430","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103430","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Therapy sessions are widely recognized as an effective form of treatment, with outcomes sometimes more strongly influenced by the quality of therapist–patient interaction and decision-making than by the specific methods employed, prompting extensive empirical investigation into these dynamics. Existing studies overlook individual differences and long-term effects, relying on generalized findings that miss the complexity of human interactions and therapeutic decision-making. To address these limitations, this study adopts a structured analytical approach that captures the nuanced, evolving nature of therapist–patient interactions and enables long-term insight into how individual behaviors and strategic decisions shape therapeutic trajectories.</div><div>Game theory, widely used to optimize and analyze multi-agent decision-making across various domains, provides a powerful framework for this study. By incorporating Nash equilibrium, Bayesian games, and repeated games, the proposed model captures the uncertainty and complexity inherent in real-world interactions. The model highlights the strategic merit of selecting non-cooperative policies under certain conditions and, through simulation analysis, demonstrates that patient behavior has a significantly greater impact on session outcomes compared to that of the therapist. Furthermore, the influence of cooperation becomes more pronounced as the planning horizon extends into the long term. Therapists who adapt their strategies to patient type and behavior can enhance outcomes, while rigidity may hinder progress. The model offers practical value in guiding effective, personalized strategy selection.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103430"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145157158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rational versus presumptive decisions in a decentralized co-production system: Solutions and applications","authors":"Zhixuan Cai ,&nbsp;Tianhu Deng ,&nbsp;Christopher S. Tang","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103412","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103412","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent research has examined the decentralized decisions of two independent parties when the system output is co-produced, i.e., the output depends on the efforts exerted by both parties. In this paper, we present a general modeling framework to reexamine the robustness of the results obtained from this stream of research. To model the decision-making process in a decentralized co-production system, we use the <em>Constant Elasticity of Substitution</em> (CES) function to model the output co-produced from the two parties and consider both simultaneous-move and sequential-move games. We also compare the equilibrium efforts exerted by <em>rational</em> firms and the optimal efforts exerted by <em>presumptive</em> firms. Here, each <em>rational</em> firm makes decisions by anticipating the other firm’s rational decision, whereas each <em>presumptive</em> firm makes decisions based on a prior belief about the other firm’s decision. We show that both simultaneous-move and sequential-move games yield similar structural results. First, the effort exerted by each <em>rational (or presumptive)</em> firm increases with the firm’s “returns on effort investment”. Second, while the efforts exerted by <em>presumptive</em> firms are not in equilibrium, we find that these off-equilibrium efforts can result in higher payoffs than the efforts exerted by <em>rational</em> firms when the prior beliefs are sufficiently high and effort cost factors are sufficiently low. We also apply these results to reexamine some key findings obtained in the recent literature whose co-production model can be viewed as special cases of the CES output function. We find that the existing results based on the special case may not hold under the general CES functions. Hence, our general model and results provide new insights. Finally, we demonstrate how our general model can be applied to examine other settings arising from product development and capacity planning decisions involving two independent parties with self-interests.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103412"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145157160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimizing election logistics: A multi-period routing problem embedding time-dependent reward functions","authors":"Renata Mansini ,&nbsp;Lorenzo Moreschini ,&nbsp;Mesut Sayin","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103428","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103428","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>With the 2024 US Presidential Election now concluded, the growing complexity of designing effective election campaigns has become clearer. Motivated by the logistical challenges associated with US election campaigns, we introduce the Reward-driven Multi-period Politician Routing Problem. It involves diverse politicians planning their campaigns over multiple days, considering constraints such as clustered locations, time- and location-dependent rewards, budget limits, mandatory rest days, and flexible daily routes that can be either open or closed, with starting and ending locations not known in advance.</div><div>We model the problem as a mixed-integer linear program, complemented with several valid inequalities, and innovate by designing new subtour elimination techniques that jointly deal with open and closed paths. We developed 36 new benchmark instances tailored to the US presidential elections. To tackle large-sized instances, we develop a Sequential Route Construction Matheuristic that exploits the multi-period structure of the problem to provide efficient and effective solutions. We incorporate time-dependent reward profiles (concave, convex, linearly decreasing, linearly increasing, and periodic) into the objective function to capture diverse decision-making perspectives. Experimental results show interesting computational issues on the different tested models and the impact of the chosen reward profile on their performance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103428"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145219210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Content moderation and creator incentives mechanism amidst controversial content surges","authors":"Ruixiao Dong ,&nbsp;Xu Guan ,&nbsp;Xiaohua Han ,&nbsp;Yuan Jiang","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103427","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103427","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The content platforms usually offer monetary rewards to creators to encourage the creation of high-quality content to attract views. This would motivate some creators to incorporate controversial content to generate engagement, which causes the platform’s reputation cost. Therefore, in practice, the platform actively conducts content moderation through various methods. In this paper, we consider two content moderation formats, Pre-Moderation format and Post-Moderation format, depending on whether the moderation takes place before or after the content’s publication. Under Pre-Moderation format, the platform reviews each content before it is released, which makes it less likely to suffer from a high reputation cost. However, the drawback is the potential for mistakenly blocking of high quality content. The platform has the incentive to reward creators to exert effort to attract views only when the platform’s payoff from each view of high-quality content is relatively high. Moreover, a more rigor moderation mechanism may not necessarily benefit the platform and hurt the low-type creators, and a high proportion of controversial-content fans may also not necessarily benefit the low-type creators. Conversely, Post-Moderation format proves more creator-friendly, as it enables each content published without check, though this comes at the expense of a higher reputation cost. Compared to Pre-Moderation format, the platform becomes more likely to provide monetary reward under Post-Moderation format only when the proportion of controversial-content fans is low. The platform’s profit and the creators’ profits can be higher under either moderation format, depending on the monetary reward strategy and the dissemination of low-quality content.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103427"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145157159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Distributionally robust multi-period operating room scheduling with multiple surgical disciplines under uncertain surgery durations","authors":"Xiaoyu Xu ,&nbsp;Yunqiang Yin ,&nbsp;Dujuan Wang ,&nbsp;T.C.E. Cheng ,&nbsp;Xiutian Sima","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103420","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103420","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study operating room (OR) scheduling with multiple surgical disciplines under uncertain surgery durations, considering time-dependent health urgency, where patient health deteriorates with the waiting time. The problem involves the opening of ORs, assignment of ORs to surgical disciplines, and assignment of surgeries (mandatory and optional surgeries) to ORs over a planning horizon, subject to the discipline-to-OR, discipline parallelism, discipline workload, and surgery deadline restrictions, and OR session capacity chance constraints. To characterize the uncertainty of surgery durations, we introduce a data-driven distributionally ambiguity set based on real surgery data, which incorporates the empirical mean and covariance. We formulate the problem as a distributionally robust chance-constrained model, where distributionally robust chance constraints are imposed on the OR session capacity. To solve the model, we transform it into a tractable mixed-integer linear program, and propose a tailored branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm based on a bounded bidirectional dynamic programming algorithm for the pricing subproblems. We use the limited-node-memory subset row inequalities to enhance the lower bounds found by column generation and apply two enhancement techniques to enhance computing efficiency. We conduct extensive numerical studies on instances generated from real surgery data. The results illustrate the computational superiority of our algorithm to the CPLEX solver, and highlight the benefits of our model over its stochastic programming counterpart and two heuristic scheduling rules. We also perform sensitivity analysis to generate managerial insights from the analytical findings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103420"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145094753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Markov Decision Process for Mixed-Model Assembly Line design under process time uncertainty","authors":"Milad Elyasi ,&nbsp;Simon Thevenin ,&nbsp;Audrey Cerqueus ,&nbsp;Alexandre Dolgui","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103425","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103425","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The industry is increasingly confronted with the challenge of process duration uncertainty in production systems. These variations are particularly problematic for manufacturers that utilize <em>Multi-Manned Mixed-Model Assembly Lines</em>, as they can cause significant disruptions that may stop the production line. Our study explores the benefit of walking workers to dynamically adjust the workforce in response to unexpected variations in process durations at different stations, a common scenario in the automotive industry. We model the dynamic workforce assignment decision as a <em>Markov Decision Process</em> (MDP), and this MDP accounts for uncertainties in process times, and it incorporates dynamic task assignment and workers’ movements. This MDP is subsequently translated into a linear program that we integrate into a higher-level <em>Mixed-Integer Linear Programming</em> model responsible for dimensioning the workforce and selecting equipment in the station. This approach results in the creation of assembly lines designed to be resilient in the face of unexpected variations in task process durations. To deal with scalability issues, we employ the Benders decomposition algorithm. The paper also presents a validation with data from a car manufacturer that reinforces the practical applicability of our methodology. Additionally, we provide managerial insights on effectively managing process time uncertainty in automotive production systems, empowering decision-makers with optimization strategies, cost-reduction approaches, and resilience-building techniques to enhance the performance and reliability of <em>Mixed-Model Assembly Lines</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103425"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145060191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A bilevel approach to integrated surgeon scheduling and surgery planning solved via branch-and-price","authors":"Broos Maenhout ,&nbsp;Přemysl Šůcha ,&nbsp;Viktorie Valdmanova ,&nbsp;Ondřej Tkadlec ,&nbsp;Jana Thao Rozlivkova","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103424","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103424","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we study a multi-agent scheduling problem for organising the operations within the operating room department. The head of the surgeon group and individual surgeons are together responsible for the surgeon schedule and surgical case planning. The surgeon head allocates time blocks to individual surgeons, whereas individual surgeons determine the planning of surgical cases independently, which might degrade the schedule quality envisaged by the surgeon head. The bilevel optimisation under study seeks an optimal Nash equilibrium solution – a surgeon schedule and surgical case plan that optimise the objectives of the surgeon head, while ensuring that no individual surgeon can improve their own objective within the allocated time blocks. We propose a dedicated branch-and-price that adds lazy constraints to the formulation of surgeon-specific pricing problems to ensure an optimal bilevel feasible solution is retrieved. In this way, the surgeon head respects the objective requirements of the individual surgeons and the solution space can be searched efficiently. In the computational experiments, we validate the performance of the proposed algorithm and its dedicated components and provide insights into the benefits of attaining an equilibrium solution under different scenarios by calculating the price of stability and the price of decentralisation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103424"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145094754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reveal the new function of crowdfunding: Production risk transfer mechanism","authors":"Yang Xu ,&nbsp;Yu Zhang ,&nbsp;Jiancheng Lyu","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103408","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103408","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Existing literature has underscored the financing advantages intrinsic to crowdfunding, often overlooking its pivotal risk transfer function. By factoring in elements of loss aversion, our study formulates a comprehensive crowdfunding model to discern disparities between the crowdfunding and traditional financing model in mitigating the production risk. In the traditional financing model, the entrepreneur navigates a strategic trade-off between the financing cost and production risk by judiciously allocating the asset–liability portfolio between personal funds and loan capital. Conversely, the crowdfunding model entails the entrepreneur pre-selling the products, thereby positioning buyers as the bearer of risk. Our results indicate that crowdfunding does not universally emerge as the dominant strategy. When the production cost is high and product value is low, the entrepreneur is advised to leverage crowdfunding to curtail financing expenses and mitigate demand uncertainty. This, however, entails transferring the production risk to buyers, necessitating the entrepreneur to set a more modest product price. When the production cost is low or the product value is high, the traditional financing model outshines crowdfunding. Introducing crowdfunding will trigger a precipitous decline in buyers’ willingness to pay and an unwarranted erosion of marginal returns. This elucidates why products unveiled on crowdfunding platforms frequently exhibit a lack of substantial value. Additionally, we introduce the deferred payment mechanism to augment crowdfunding efficacy and unveil its role in risk sharing. We also analyze in detail how the optimal prepayment ratio is affected by capital constraints, product attributes, risks, and market size. Finally, we explore five intriguing extensions: heterogeneous buyer valuations, the market size follows uniform distribution, hybrid financing, quality endogeneity, and partial consumers in crowdfunding market, yielding valuable insights.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103408"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145117721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Online coupon and offline service efforts in omnichannel retailing with cross-channel effect","authors":"Kebing Chen ,&nbsp;Qinyi Zhang ,&nbsp;Shengbin Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103423","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103423","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops three channel models consisting of an online retailer and an offline counterpart, including the multichannel model, the buy-online pick-up in-store (BOPS) model, and the buy-online return in-store (BORS) model. First, we examine the impacts of online return rate and consumers’ return cost on the performance and optimal strategies of the retailers for each channel model. Then, we explore the conditions for the online retailer to adopt the omnichannel strategy (i.e., BOPS, BORS) and evaluate the resulting impact on the offline retailer’s profit. Next, we conduct the comparative analysis on the optimal decisions and performance of both online and offline retailers pre- and post-implementation of BOPS/BORS. Moreover, we also explore the scenario where the offline retailer offers coupons and consumers exhibit free-riding behavior. Our findings reveal that the choice between adopting BOPS or BORS depends on the return rate and return processing cost. Under the same external conditions (i.e., return rate, consumers’ return cost), a low return processing cost can prompt a stronger inclination toward BORS for the online retailer, whereas a higher cost push him to choose BOPS. After the implementation of omnichannel, the offline retailer’s profit from initial products is reduced, but the cross-selling opportunities are increased. Through the robustness analysis of the model, the motivation for adopting an omnichannel strategy remains largely unchanged when the offline retailer also offers coupons, although the threshold values are changed. Furthermore, the omnichannel motivation is influenced by the prevalence of free-riding behavior when such behaviors are taken into account.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103423"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145094927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Outliers and rewards in regulation: Insights from German electricity benchmarking","authors":"Mohsen Afsharian ,&nbsp;Peter Bogetoft","doi":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103426","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.omega.2025.103426","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Benchmarking is a key tool in regulatory frameworks for assessing the efficiency of network industries. In this context, identifying outliers is crucial, as their presence can significantly distort benchmarking outcomes and the resulting firm incentives. This paper focuses on two types of performance-related outliers: influential units – firms that define the frontier and significantly affect the efficiency scores of others, and atypical units – firms that have unusual input–output profiles but little or no influence on the rest of the sample. Using the German electricity sector as a case study, we examine the methodology of the <em>Bundesnetzagentur</em> (BNetzA), a pioneer in regulatory benchmarking. We show that its reliance on standard dominance and super-efficiency analysis fails to distinguish between these two types, which may result in misaligned incentives. To address this gap, we propose two methodological refinements – a revised dominance measure and a radius-based super-efficiency approach – embedded in a transparent procedure tailored to regulatory benchmarking. The proposed approach is designed to support a more consistent and targeted application of performance-based rewards, while remaining fully compatible with existing regulatory procedures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":19529,"journal":{"name":"Omega-international Journal of Management Science","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 103426"},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145108768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}