Production and Operations Management最新文献

{"title":"EXPRESS: Magnify Cascades of eWOM on Social Networks: the Roles of User, Product, and Relationship Characteristics","authors":"Zhihong Ke, De Liu, Daniel L. Brass","doi":"10.1177/10591478241252689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241252689","url":null,"abstract":"Firms are increasingly relying on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), in the form of online reviews and social media posts, to sell their products or services. A pivotal component of managing eWOM is to understand and, potentially influence, how one consumer’s eWOM can lead to another’s – a process called behavioral cascading. While prior eWOM research has established the importance of behavioral cascading between connected users, there is little understanding of what factors could impact the likelihood of such cascades. To address this gap, we draw on the theory of competitive altruism to identify several moderators of behavioral cascading in eWOM. Our empirical tests using an online review dataset from Yelp show that eWOM cascading between a followee and a follower is less likely when the followee is a high-status member, a female, or has a strong connection with the follower; and more likely when the product in consideration is inexpensive. These findings provide valuable insights about the behavioral cascading process in eWOM and hold implications for social media platforms and sellers to facilitate the cascades of eWOM between connected consumers.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140673303","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: Optimizing Production Relocation Timing Decisions","authors":"G. Fruchter, Ashutosh Prasad, Thomas Reutterer","doi":"10.1177/10591478241252687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241252687","url":null,"abstract":"In a globalized economy, companies face a range of challenges and opportunities related to relocating production activities to a new country. Relocation can yield significant cost savings and other benefits, but there are also risks including potential damage to the brand image. Thus, firms need to carefully evaluate when to relocate and when to stop production in a particular location. We formulate an optimal control model and derive analytical as well as numerical results to provide insights into the optimal relocation timing and production stoppage decisions. We show that factors like higher relocation cost, higher production costs in the relocation country but high brand image in the country of origin, can postpone production relocation. Competitive effects alter relocation timing, particularly when the firm faces direct competition and asymmetric negative cross-image spillover effects with the rival brand in the home or relocation country. The paper discusses illustrative examples and derives implications for the timing of relocation and the duration of production in the relocation country.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140675229","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: Counterfeit Competition with Strategic Consumers","authors":"Yucheng Ding, Xu Guan, Jiannan Ke","doi":"10.1177/10591478241252149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241252149","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates competition between a branded firm selling a durable good over two periods and a deceptive counterfeiter entering the market in the second period. The two firms engage in a price signaling game in which the branded firm designs its price strategy over two periods, and strategic consumers decide whether to buy the authentic product upfront or wait until the second period. We find that the branded firm may benefit from the counterfeit competition if the quality gap between the two products is sufficiently large. The intuition is that the branded firm would charge a high second-period price to signal its authenticity, inducing more consumers to buy the genuine product upfront. This strategy allows the branded firm to increase its first-period price and demand simultaneously, thus effectively mitigating the time-inconsistency problem. Otherwise, when the quality gap is small, counterfeit competition leads to reduced profits for the authentic product. These results remain robust throughout several extensions of the base model, including partially informed or naive consumers, asymmetric retail channels, post-purchase regret, and endogenized counterfeit.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140675073","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: Channel Choice via On-Line Platform","authors":"Stephen M. Gilbert, P. Hotkar, Chuanjun Liu","doi":"10.1177/10591478241249478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241249478","url":null,"abstract":"Several major on-line platforms operate two channels: an agency channel in which suppliers retain control over prices and quantities and pay a portion of sales revenue to the platform, and a reselling channel in which the platform purchases goods from the supplier and resells them to consumers. These two channels run in parallel and many suppliers interact with only one of them. Although it is quite easy for a supplier to sell through a platform’s agency channel, they must typically be invited to participate in the reselling channel. We develop a model of a powerful platform that can offer a supplier a two-part contract to induce it to participate in its reselling channel instead of its agency channel. When the supplier sells through the platform’s agency channel, we find that if the competition among the traditional resellers is at least moderate and the on-line platform is a close enough substitute for traditional resale channel, then the equilibrium quantities sold through the on-line and traditional channels both exceed the first best quantities. This would not occur if the supplier sold through either the on-line or the traditional channel in isolation. Nor does it occur if the supplier sells through the platform’s reselling channel. As a consequence, we find that when competition among traditional resellers is at least moderate, and both the commission rate and the substitutability between the on-line platform and the traditional resale channel are sufficiently high, there is a Pareto improving reselling contract between the supplier and the platform.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140697660","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: Ten Most Influential Papers from the First Thirty Years of the Production and Operations Management Journal","authors":"Subodha Kumar, Vinod R. Singhal","doi":"10.1177/10591478241250036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241250036","url":null,"abstract":"We describe the process used to identify the ten most influential papers published in the Production and Operations Management ( POM) journal in its first thirty years. We also briefly discuss and highlight the selected papers.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140695102","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: Cost Optimization in Cloud Computing: Capacity Reservation for Intermittent Random Demand Surges","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/10591478241251614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241251614","url":null,"abstract":"The adoption of cloud computing has been accelerating over the last decade, while enterprise cloud users (“firms”) are struggling to manage their growing cloud expenditures in the face of intermittent digital demand surges caused by planned or random events. To deal with such challenges, a firm can employ reserved instances with the standard contract length (e.g., one year) to meet the stationary base demand, which we refer to as the base contracts, complemented by additional reserved instances with either standard or shorter contract lengths, which we refer to as the supplementary contracts, to cope with the demand surges. We first analyze a model whereby the surge and inter-surge durations are deterministic, demand magnitude is random, and cancellation of the reservations is allowed. We develop a capacity management plan for the firm including not only the optimal capacity levels, which follow a newsvendor-type solution, but also the optimal policy for managing the purchase, renewal, cancellation, or expiration of the supplementary contracts, which can be characterized as a two-threshold policy. Due to the complexity of the structure of the optimal policy, we also construct an effective heuristic policy by excluding the renewal option from the action space, which can be applied to a more general setting where the surge and inter-surge durations are random. We examine two model extensions: (1) when trades of reserved instances are allowed in a secondary marketplace; (2) when the firm does not have exact information about the distributions of the surge magnitude and duration while it can adjust the capacity levels as data unveils. Our analysis shows that the optimal policy for managing the supplementary contracts depends on the relative magnitude of the surge and inter-surge durations in relationship to the cancellation fee. Moreover, our numerical results show that cloud platforms that offer a secondary marketplace are more attractive to firms from a cost standpoint than those that allow cancellation only. The latter, without the secondary marketplace, however, can achieve parity with the former by offering a deeper discount rate for the reserved instances, thereby bypassing the cost of administering the secondary marketplace.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140696325","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: Product Customization and Returns: the Moderating Role of National Culture","authors":"Haileab Hilafu, Paolo Letizia, Paolo Roma","doi":"10.1177/10591478241249477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241249477","url":null,"abstract":"Product customization enables consumers to tailor products to their individual preferences. One benefit of customization is its lower volume of returns. By customizing, consumers learn about their product preferences and develop a sense of attachment to the products they help “create.” As a result, they are less likely to return the purchased items. The effect of product customization on returns may depend on cultural traits of consumers, such as the extent to which they would avoid uncertainty or the degree to which they would feel “subordinate” to authority. Hence, this article studies how national cultures moderate the negative relationship between customization and returns. Our investigation analyzes a unique dataset from a leading global luxury brand manufacturer that offers both standard and customized versions of a product across more than 20 countries. We find that the disparity in return rates between standard (higher rate) versus customized products (lower rate) depends on the cultural dimensions originally introduced by Hofstede. This gap widens with masculinity and uncertainty avoidance, but narrows with power distance and individualism. Therefore, multinational firms should weigh these aspects of national cultures when designing both customization and return policies.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140697917","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: Enhancing Make-to-Order Manufacturing Agility: When Flexible Capacity Meets Dynamic Pricing","authors":"X. Sun, Shiwei Chai, Anand A. Paul, Lingjiong Zhu","doi":"10.1177/10591478241249122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241249122","url":null,"abstract":"The rise of online marketplaces has raised customer expectations regarding customization and lead time. It poses significant challenges to manufacturing firms and prompts a move from make-to-stock to a more flexible make-to-order system. Compared to make-to-stock settings, make-to-order systems cannot smooth fluctuations in demand using available stock. While viewing dynamic pricing as a useful strategy to balance supply with demand, many manufacturing firms can also create capacity flexibility. In that scenario, system costs could be cut by managing capacity and demand simultaneously. In this paper, we consider a make-to-order production environment with base and surge capacity as well as the ability to adjust product pricing. Our main focus is on operational decision-making, assuming that the base capacity and surge capacity are fixed, but activating the surge capacity incurs a setup cost. Initially, we propose a stochastic control model to reflect this complex decision problem. However, our initial model leads to an intractable dynamic programming problem. To overcome this, we convert the problem to a more tractable diffusion control problem. This approach helps to reveal the conditions under which utilizing flexible capacity is more advantageous than relying solely on fixed capacity. When flexible capacity is advantageous, we provide a solution to the diffusion control problem that can guide optimal capacity and price adjustments. We discover an interesting interplay between capacity adjustment and dynamic pricing. In particular, we find that the price, which aims at reducing congestion, may not monotonically increase with the congestion level when capacity adjustments incur a fixed cost.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140702302","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: Equity in Health and Humanitarian Logistics: a People-Centered Perspective","authors":"T. Breugem, Yu Fan, Andreas K. Gernert, L. V. Van Wassenhove","doi":"10.1177/10591478241248751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241248751","url":null,"abstract":"Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are at the core of present-day health and humanitarian logistics. Aid organizations advocate inclusive people-centered approaches to ensure that affected communities receive appropriate aid in an effective and equitable way. Tensions and even conflicts can arise if affected communities perceive the distribution of aid as inequitable. These perceptions are driven by people’s so-called distributional preferences. These preferences are shaped by culture, social bonds, and experiences, and they describe how an individual’s well-being and behavior are impacted by potential inequalities. Their importance is increasingly recognized by aid organizations, but research on equity in health and humanitarian logistics remains focused on equal access and prioritizing needs. Using current examples from the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises, we show the importance of recognizing and managing distributional preferences. Based on these examples and in line with DEI principles, we discuss several ways that we, as the operations community, can help conceptualize inclusive and people-centered approaches that account for distributional preferences.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140710539","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: Can Digital Skills Empower Disadvantaged Castes and Women? Evidence from India","authors":"Che-Wei Liu, Terence Saldanha, Sunil Mithas","doi":"10.1177/10591478241248749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241248749","url":null,"abstract":"How do digital skills influence individuals’ wages in contexts where caste-based and gender-based social stratification play an important role? We draw on sociology and economics literature to argue that the returns to digital skills in such contexts are shaped by caste and gender, and that digital skills empower disadvantaged individuals to increase their wages. Our empirical analysis of a rich micro-dataset on more than 20,000 individuals over two years of observations in India yields two key findings. First, we find that the positive returns to digital skills are greater for individuals from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India than for individuals from other castes. Second, we find that the returns to digital skills are greater for women than for men. We also find that movement up the skilled occupation ladder is a mechanism that mediates the relationship between digital skills and wages. Our post hoc exploratory analyses suggest that among individuals from the lowest castes, the returns to digital skills are greater for women than for men, and that returns to digital skills are lower in regions with less developed infrastructure and lower literacy rates than in other regions. We discuss the implications of our findings for diversity, equity, and inclusion research in operations management.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140709932","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}