Production and Operations Management最新文献

{"title":"EXPRESS: Robust Demand Estimation with Customer Choice-Based Models for Sales Transaction Data","authors":"Sanghoon Cho, Mark Ferguson, Jongho Im, Pelin Pekgün","doi":"10.1177/10591478241258197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241258197","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a novel statistical method to estimate customer choice among a firm’s portfolio of offerings when the firm cannot directly observe customers who choose not to purchase any product. This censored demand problem is prevalent in many industries such as hotels, airlines, and retail. Although several methods have been proposed to address this problem, they require some level of data aggregation across arrivals and/or choice sets, which results in information loss and potentially biased estimates. Therefore, they have limited applicability in an environment where the prices of a firm’s portfolio of offerings vary over time and sometimes even across different customers. Our proposed method combines several desirable properties, which makes it a better fit for realistic datasets where the available choice sets or attributes of the products in the choice sets change over time. We consider two additional types of information for identification of our model parameters: 1) additional mild assumptions on the customers’ utility function, and 2) external information about a firm’s market share. We then develop a robust estimation procedure that accounts for inaccuracies in either information type and let the data determine the best approach. Through Monte-Carlo simulations, we show that our approach provides promising predictions of customer choice behavior when compared with other generally used methods and clearly outperforms those methods in scenarios where the product prices change frequently over time. Utilizing a real hotel transaction dataset provided by Oracle Labs, we further illustrate the improved estimation accuracy of our method compared to benchmark methods. Relative to existing approaches for estimating customer choice-based models, our proposed methodology better suits environments employing dynamic pricing and personalized offering practices, such as hospitality or online retailing.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141124615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: 3D Printing-as-a-Service: an Economic Analysis of Pricing and Co-creation","authors":"Tarun Jain, J. Hazra, Ram Gopal","doi":"10.1177/10591478241257660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241257660","url":null,"abstract":"3D printing technology has opened up possibilities of product design collaborations between device providers and customers. To enable an environment of co-creation, device providers are now renting 3D printers via the 3D-as-a-Service (3DaaS) model. Although prior research has examined pricing and quality issues in the traditional manufacturing setup, these studies have not analyzed such decisions in the 3D printing supply chain setting, where end users possess the ability to customize product designs. Therefore, several important questions remain unanswered from the perspective of the 3D printing device provider. For example, what is the appropriate pricing model for providing 3DaaS? How do factors like the extent of design customization and the complexity influence the pricing strategy of the 3DaaS firm? Our analysis shows that if the customers’ impact on the product quality is relatively high or low, the pay-per-build pricing model generates a higher profit than the fixed-fee pricing model. Interestingly, we also find that if customers frequently print highly intricate product designs, the firm might choose the pay-per-build pricing model, only if the likelihood of design failure for these complex structures is low. Otherwise, the firm might opt for a fixed-fee pricing model.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140981585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: U.S. Public Sector Supplier Diversity: an Intersectional Invisibility Perspective","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/10591478241256381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241256381","url":null,"abstract":"Motivated by a desire to understand who benefits from public-sector supplier diversity, and why, we conducted a comparative case study across six U.S. state-level supplier diversity programs. We collected/analyzed qualitative data via semi-structured interviews with high-level state leaders and collected spending data via 2017–2021 semiannual/annual reports. We found that businesses owned by White women benefit more from supplier diversity programs than those owned by ethnic minorities (Blacks, Hispanics, Indigenous, and Asians). Adopting an intersectional invisibility perspective, we conduct within- and cross-case analyses of the collected data, we highlight key themes and make several recommendations for how public-sector supplier diversity programs can systemically address disparities and improve their performance. We also offer recommendations for future research into this ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140997062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: To Hinder or to Facilitate: Retailers’ Strategy of Consumer Information Sharing","authors":"Buqing Ma, Guang Li, Guangwen Kong","doi":"10.1177/10591478241256662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241256662","url":null,"abstract":"Consumer information sharing is considered an effective strategy to attract consumers, yet certain high-end retailers, such as Bergdorf Goodman and Farfetch, tend to hinder consumers from sharing information through online reviews. We study a retailer’s strategy for consumer information sharing in a supply chain. We find that a retailer’s information sharing strategy can prevent manufacturers from extracting excessive profit when consumers are heterogeneous in their valuations of the selling product. Specifically, a retailer can achieve a higher profit margin by targeting all consumer segments. By strategically choosing the information sharing strategy to influence consumer beliefs, the retailer can induce the manufacturer to conform to the retailer’s preferred targeting segment through a low wholesale price. Thus, a high-end retailer, whose consumers have a high ex-ante quality belief, favors hindering information sharing among consumers because it enables the retailer to target all consumer segments. Interestingly, deterring consumers from learning about the product quality may generate more consumer surplus. Our main results are robust under extensions such as consumer search behavior, consumer waiting, and multiple product selling. When selling multiple products, a retailer with a large quality variation is better off hindering consumers from sharing information. Our work shows that strategically choosing a consumer information sharing strategy enables retailers to enhance profit margins in their interactions with upstream manufacturers.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140995670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Gender and Serious Drug Recalls: a Textual Sentiment Analysis of Drug Reviews on WebMD","authors":"George P. Ball, Hessam Bavafa, Christian C. Blanco, Hyunwoo Park, Kaitlin D. Wowak","doi":"10.1177/10591478241256644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241256644","url":null,"abstract":"Consumers taking prescription drugs have limited ability to ascertain drug quality before taking the drug. After drug use, however, consumers frequently report their personal experiences with prescription drugs on one of the world’s largest medical websites: WebMD. Drug reviews on WebMD are a potentially rich source of free-form text that can be utilized to inform firms, consumers, researchers, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the quality and safety of prescription drugs. Additionally, because men and women communicate in starkly different ways, the gender of the reviewer may play a key role in drug reviews signaling drug quality problems. We examine if drug review textual sentiment is associated with the hazard of a serious drug recall and whether this relationship varies depending on the gender of the reviewer. We analyze textual sentiment on drug reviews from WebMD along with 13 years of drug recall data using several hazard models. We find that the more negative the drug review sentiment, the greater the hazard of a serious recall on that drug. This relationship is completely explained by drug reviews written by females; reviews written by males have no explanatory power. Our findings are confirmed by numerous robustness checks. In post-hoc analysis, we explore possible mechanisms by comparing female and male adverse events on the recalled drugs in our study. Our contributions to gender diversity and drug quality literature leads to implications for the FDA, WebMD, and firms that manufacture prescription drugs.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140994377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Crowd-starting a Shared (Shuttle) Service with Customer Suggestions","authors":"Long He, Tu Ni","doi":"10.1177/10591478241256383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241256383","url":null,"abstract":"Digital platforms have improved the effciency and quality of smart city operations by soliciting more customer inputs, for example, in the form of suggestions. One innovative option in urban transportation is the shared shuttle service, which lies between traditional public transportation and ride-hailing services. Platforms that offer these services can gather customer suggestions in a crowd-starting\" manner, which provides valuable insights into customer needs. However, this also presents a challenge in balancing service coverage and quality to meet customer needs implied by their suggestions. To address this issue, we introduce an optimization framework designed to maximize expected profit by leveraging customer response models which characterize how customers will respond to different service attributes and how their suggestions inform these responses. When estimating these response models, we present methods involving isotonic penalty and shrinkage tailored for handling small datasets. To demonstrate the practical implications, we apply our model to a shared shuttle service case study and discuss practical considerations, such as the value of information, the effectiveness of our estimation approaches, and the benefits of involving customers in the service design process.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140997961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: The Effects of Collectivism and Organizational Tenure on the Emergence of Pre-Release Digital Piracy","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/10591478241256167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241256167","url":null,"abstract":"As businesses increasingly move into digital domains, digital piracy has become more prevalent and more costly. Pre-release piracy, where pirated versions of digital products are distributed before legitimate ones, remains particularly damaging to digital product developers. Although workers’ social norms may play a critical role, limited research exists on the behavioral factors that intentionally or unintentionally contribute to pre-release piracy, particularly when considering multinational nuances (e.g., national cultures) and workers’ experience (e.g., organizational tenure). To address this gap, we develop and test an empirical model of how national culture and organizational tenure jointly predict the likelihood of pre-release piracy. Our empirical analyses employ a dataset compiled from more than twenty distinct sources and capture the electronic video game industry’s PC-based products from 2000 through 2019. For national culture, we focus on two forms of collectivism – institutional and in-group – finding that institutional collectivism is associated with a reduced likelihood of pre-release piracy, while in-group collectivism increases it. We also find that the likelihood of pre-release piracy reduces with a product development team’s organizational tenure, but that this relationship is distinctively moderated by each of collectivism’s two forms. Specifically, the benefits of increased organizational tenure are amplified in the presence of stronger institutional collectivism but muted in the presence of stronger in-group collectivism. We link our findings to research streams on national culture, digital piracy, and organizational tenure, and specify contributions to each.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140995304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Decentralized Online Order Fulfillment in Omni-Channel Retailers","authors":"Opher Baron, A. Ciré, Sinem Savaser","doi":"10.1177/10591478241255066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241255066","url":null,"abstract":"We consider an order fulfillment problem of an omni-channel retailer that ships online orders from its distribution center (DC) and brick-and-mortar stores. Stores use their local information, not observed by the retailer, that can lead them to accept or reject fulfillment requests of items in an online order. We investigate the problem of sequencing requests to stores and inventory rationing decisions at the DC to minimize expected costs under uncertain store acceptance behavior and when items are indistinguishable in terms of shipping. First, under the scenario that stores are used only when the DC has insufficient inventory, we propose a Markov Decision Process formulation and analyze the performance of myopic policies that are preferable because of their interpretability. We show that the performance rate of a myopic approach that orders stores by cost only depends on the number of items in an order, which is small in practice. We also determine conditions for the range of acceptance probabilities for the myopic policy to be optimal for small-sized orders. Using optimality conditions for a special case of the problem, we develop an adaptive variant of the myopic policy, and propose a new degree-based strategy that balances shipping costs and acceptance probabilities. Numerical testing suggests that the best-performing sequencing policy is within 1% of optimality on average. Moreover, using two years of data from a large omni-channel retailer in North America, we observe that adaptive policies, albeit more complex, are beneficial in reducing costs and split deliveries if acceptance rates can be estimated accurately. Second, we determine when the retailer should ship from stores or ration the inventory at the DC. We show that for single-item orders, the optimal policy has a threshold structure, where, remarkably, the highest priority region is also subject to rationing. We then consider the novel multi-unit-single-item rationing problem, and leverage the structure of the single-unit model to develop a heuristic. We numerically establish the efficacy of rationing models and our heuristic.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141009317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Competitive Dynamic Pricing under Capacity Constraints: an Experimental Study","authors":"Bahriye Cesaret, A. Bayram","doi":"10.1177/10591478241255667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241255667","url":null,"abstract":"Keeping up with competitors’ prices is one of the top operational challenges in pricing. However, competitive interactions in revenue management have not received much research attention in the past due to their complexity. We conduct a series of laboratory experiments to investigate the dynamic pricing behavior of two capacity-constrained firms under competition. Our experiments initially control for strategic interactions between the sellers and then allow for them. To gain a broader understanding, we also manipulate demand uncertainty and the expected market size. Our results confirm the dependency of dynamic pricing decisions on the competitor’s behavior. We find that the theory is much more forgiving—in the sense that it predicts a lower level of competition among the sellers—than what we actually observe in the laboratory. The modeling literature indicates that the seller with the lower capacity has a competitive advantage, but our results reveal the opposite. Further, there is potential for high-capacity sellers to benefit from competition. Sellers tend to underprice (resp., overprice) their units at the beginning (resp., end) of a selling season. Also, competition lasts longer than the theory predicts, and customers benefit from the biases of the competing sellers. The higher-capacity seller following the best-response policy is not harmed due to the biases of the competitor. However, the lower-capacity seller’s performance is greatly influenced by the competitor's degree of rationality.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141011382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Unlocking the Role of Language and National Culture: Effects on Supply Chain Operations in a Global Context","authors":"Mohammad Hashemi Joo, Yuka Nishikawa, K. Dandapani, Vaidyanathan Jayaraman","doi":"10.1177/10591478241254853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241254853","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate how language, an essential part of culture, affects manufacturing firms’ supply chain operations management practices, including the cash conversion cycle and its components. Based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which theorizes that a language’s structure may affect how its speakers think, prior studies have established that using the future tense to describe future events increases one’s mental distance from the future, reducing a person’s concern about it. Building upon this foundation, we hypothesize that firms in weak future-time reference countries are likely to be better prepared for future volatility in demand for their products and therefore carry higher inventory to avoid potential stockouts. We also hypothesize that firms in weak future-time reference countries are more apprehensive about long-term relationships with their customers and hence extend longer credit terms to them. Finally, we hypothesize that firms in weak future-time reference countries have longer operating and cash conversion cycles due to carrying higher levels of inventory and extending longer credit terms to customers. The empirical results using a large global sample of 193,625 firm-year observations from 45 countries support our hypotheses. In terms of economic significance, on average, the cash conversion cycle of firms in weak future-time reference countries is approximately 11 percent longer than that of firms in strong future-time reference countries. We also find that the effect of language is dominant over the influence of traditional cultural dimensions. Together, the results suggest that time encoding in the language of a firm is a determining factor in its supply chain operations.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141020022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}