Manufacturing Engineering最新文献

{"title":"Service Networks with Open Routing and Procedurally Rational Customers","authors":"Andrew E. Frazelle, Tingliang Huang, Y. Wei","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3414468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3414468","url":null,"abstract":"Problem Definition: We investigate the implications of procedurally rational customers on service networks where customers visit multiple stations but can choose the order in which to visit the stations. \u0000 \u0000Academic/Practical Relevance: Self-interested customers populate various service systems. While self-interested, these customers may not be fully rational. Customers' form of reasoning and its consequences for system performance affect the planning decisions of service providers. \u0000Methodology: We study procedurally rational customers---that is, customers make decisions based on anecdotal samples of system times experienced by customers who previously visited the system and followed each possible route. Using a fluid model, we fully characterize the evolution of customer routing decisions, with customers deciding in each period based on samples from the previous period. \u0000 \u0000Results: We completely specify the set of equilibrium routing profiles, where the fraction of customers choosing each route becomes stationary. In contrast with existing models of procedural rationality, we find that procedurally rational customers sometimes behave differently from fully rational customers, but not always. Equilibria can emerge under procedural rationality that differ from fully rational equilibria, in which case, system performance suffers. We also study systems in which customers make routing decisions. We find analytically that procedurally rational customers are slower to internalize price increases than fully rational customers: accordingly, the firm's optimal revenue is higher (lower) with procedurally rational customers than fully rational ones if the waiting cost is high (low). \u0000 \u0000Managerial Implications: In systems in which customers make only routing decisions, procedural rationality can lead to much longer waiting times. However, the firm can avoid increased waiting times if it can choose the service rates at its stations. Furthermore, if customers make joining decisions, then a service provider should price differently depending on which form of reasoning customers use, and the firm may prefer either procedurally rational customers or fully rational ones depending on the system parameters.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81013837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Information Design to Facilitate Social Interactions on Service Platforms: Evidence from a Large Field Experiment","authors":"Hengchen Dai, Dennis J. Zhang, Zhiwei Xu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3528619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3528619","url":null,"abstract":"As digitization enables service platforms to track users’ footprints and control information design, important questions arise about how digital service platforms should disseminate customer-related information to service providers to shape user behavior in the desired direction. We contribute to this understanding by examining the impact of a novel information design — providing customer-related information to facilitate interaction between service providers and customers at the beginning of a service encounter — on service capacity and quality. We evaluate this strategy via a field experiment on a live streaming platform that connects individual broadcasters and viewers. When viewers entered shows, we provided information about viewers to broadcasters that were randomly assigned to the treatment condition (but not to control broadcasters). Our analysis involving 49,999 broadcasters confirms that our intervention increased the interaction between broadcasters and viewers by 8.66% during the first minute after viewers entered a show. Furthermore, treatment broadcasters expanded their service capacity by 8.74% via increasing both the frequency (by 3.96%) and length (by 7.52%) of shows. This is not because treatment broadcasters could or believed they could earn more per minute of service but rather because they felt more connected with viewers and enjoyed performing more. Moreover, our intervention increased experienced service quality (as measured by viewers’ watch time) by 5.85%, without affecting willingness to pay. The increase is not simply driven by treatment broadcasters’ expanded service capacity. Instead, viewers were more likely to ``follow\" treatment broadcasters and watch their future shows, suggesting that our intervention made viewers feel more connected with broadcasters. Our low-cost information-based intervention has important implications for digital service platforms that do not have control over service providers’ work schedules and service quality.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89391898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Facility Location with Joint Disruptions","authors":"Vishwakant Malladi, K. Muthuraman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3515230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3515230","url":null,"abstract":"Classical facility location problems do not incorporate the possibility of disruptions among facilities and usually result in solutions that do not perform well under disruptions. Existent literature on disreputable facility locations focuses on independent or extreme dependence scenarios where the probability structure is simplistic but has the advantage of allowing for efficient optimization. We propose the use of partially subordinated Markov Chains to model the probability of the dependent risk of disruptions. This parsimonious approach o ers a realistic model for disruptions. We also propose algorithms to calibrate a partially subordinated Markov Chain model and to optimize for the facility locations under dependent disruptions. We calibrate our model on two different cases with four different disruption data sets each and solve for the optimal facility location choice. We show that the resulting solutions significantly outperform those yielded from stronger assumptions like independence or extreme dependence.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"169 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90430542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Food Delivery Service and Restaurant: Friend or Foe?","authors":"Manlu Chen, Ming Hu, Jianfu Wang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3469971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3469971","url":null,"abstract":"With emerging food delivery services, customers can hire delivery workers to pick up food on their behalf and deliver it to them. To investigate the long-term impact of food delivery services on the restaurant industry, we model a restaurant serving food to customers as a stylized single-server queue with two streams of customers. One stream consists of tech-savvy customers who have access to a food delivery service platform. The other stream consists of traditional customers who are not tech-savvy enough to use a food delivery service and only walk in by themselves. We study a Stackelberg game, in which the restaurant first sets the price of the food, the same for online and offline customers; the food delivery platform then sets the delivery fee; and, last, rational customers decide whether to walk in, balk, or use a food delivery service if they have access to one. We show that the food delivery platform does not necessarily increase demand for the restaurant but may just change the composition of customers, as the segment of tech-savvy customers grows. Hence, paying the platform for bringing in customers may hurt the restaurant's profitability. Furthermore, under conditions of no coordination between the restaurant and the food delivery platform, we show, somewhat surprisingly, that more customers having access to a food delivery service may hurt the food delivery platform itself and the society, when the food delivery service is sufficiently convenient and the pool of delivery workers is large enough. This is because the restaurant can become a delivery-only kitchen and raise its food price, leaving little surplus for the food delivery platform and consumers. But this would not happen when the pool of delivery workers could be capped. It is implied that limiting the number of delivery workers provides a simple yet effective means for the food delivery platform to improve its own profit while benefiting social welfare at the same time.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"109 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86975723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blind Network Revenue Management and Bandits with Knapsacks under Limited Switches","authors":"D. Simchi-Levi, Yunzong Xu, Jinglong Zhao","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3479477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3479477","url":null,"abstract":"Our work is motivated by a common business constraint in online markets. While firms respect the advantages of dynamic pricing and price experimentation, they must limit the number of price changes (i.e., switches) to be within some budget due to various practical reasons. We study both the classical price-based network revenue management problem in the distributionally-unknown setup, and the bandits with knapsacks problem. In these problems, a decision-maker (without prior knowledge of the environment) has finite initial inventory of multiple resources to allocate over a finite time horizon. Beyond the classical resource constraints, we introduce an additional switching constraint to these problems, which restricts the total number of times that the decision-maker makes switches to be within a fixed switching budget. For such problems, we show matching upper and lower bounds on the optimal regret, and propose computationally-efficient limited-switch algorithms that achieve the optimal regret. Our work reveals a surprising result: the optimal regret rate is completely characterized by a piecewise-constant function of the switching budget, which further depends on the number of resource constraints --- notably, this is the first time the number of resources constraints is shown to play a fundamental role in determining the statistical complexity of online learning problems. We conduct computational experiments to examine the performance of our algorithms on a numerical setup that is widely used in the literature. Compared with benchmark algorithms from the literature, our proposed algorithms achieve promising performance with clear advantages on the number of incurred switches. Practically, firms can benefit from our study and improve their learning and decision-making performance when they simultaneously face resource and switching constraints","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82255661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capacity Allocation for Producing Age-Based Products","authors":"Hossein Jahandideh, K. McCardle, Christopher S. Tang, B. Fahimnia","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3453845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3453845","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a firm's production and sales decisions for an age-based product (e.g. whiskey, wine, or cheese) whose value increases with aging. The firm has been selling only a younger aged product but is considering introducing a new product by setting some of its production aside to age longer. The firm has a fixed production capacity and the differently aged products are partial substitutes. As such, the firm must decide, period by period, how much, if any, of that period's production to set aside for additional aging.<br><br>While the currently available younger product faces a stable and known demand, we consider scenarios in which the demand of the new product is either (1) deterministic or (2) stochastic.<br><br>In the deterministic demand scenario, we provide an analytic solution to the infinite horizon problem and show that the optimal fraction of production reserved for additional aging increases to a steady state solution. Though our model is dynamic, we show that a static policy, which is easy to compute and intuitively appealing, performs quite well. For the stochastic-demand scenario, we show that, under reasonable conditions, a \"certainty equivalence'' policy is optimal. Hence the stochastic problem is effectively equivalent to the deterministic demand case.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86216995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impact of Supply Chain Flexibility and Supplier Development on Supply Chain Effectiveness in Automotive Industry of Pakistan","authors":"Kafeel Uddin Quershi, D. Siddiqui","doi":"10.18034/ABCJAR.V8I1.84","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18034/ABCJAR.V8I1.84","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this research is to study the significance of supply chain strategies namely supplier development and supply chain flexibility towards supply chain effectiveness in automotive industry of Pakistan. A survey was conducted using self-administered questionnaires to collect data from 300 supply chain professionals working in automotive manufacturing companies of Pakistan. The finding indicates that supplier development and supply chain flexibility have positive and significant impact on supply chain effectiveness in automotive industry of Pakistan. The research will help policy makers and management to integrate strategies and practices related to supplier development and flexibility to improve supply chain effectiveness in order to be competitive in automotive industry of Pakistan.  \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"171 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88460220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Strategic Behavior for Hotel Standby Upgrade Programs: Empirical Evidence and Pricing Implications","authors":"Övünç Yılmaz, Mark E. Ferguson, Pelin Pekgün, Guangzhi Shang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3411087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3411087","url":null,"abstract":"Many hotels have recently started to offer room upgrades digitally after the completion of booking to replace traditional front-desk upselling during check-in. Quickly becoming popular for upselling the premium room inventory that may otherwise go unused, \"standby upgrade\" -- an availability-based, discounted premium room upgrade -- is a prominent example. However, customers, in particular loyalty members, may become knowledgeable about standby upgrades through repeated interactions with this technology, and act strategically, i.e., initially choose a standard room with the expectation of being offered a premium room discount through standby upgrades. Consequently, while enjoying the benefits of this program, hotels may face the potential cannibalization of premium sales due to such strategic behavior and need to adjust their pricing accordingly. Using a major hotel chain's 16-month booking and standby upgrades data, we empirically investigate the existence and extent of strategic customers in the context of standby upgrades. After showing preliminary evidence of potential strategic behavior, we develop a maximum likelihood estimator to estimate the percentage of customers who are strategic. This estimator captures the sequential nature of customer decision-making for standby upgrades (booking decision, clicking the standby upgrades offer, and requesting an upgrade) through a Sequential Logit Model. We find evidence of strategic behavior in three (out of eight) hotels examined. Considering both a weak-form and a strong-form strategic behavior, our estimates suggest that 12% to 42% of the loyalty customers act strategically in these three properties. We then propose a new pricing policy to help hoteliers maximize their premium room revenues from direct bookings and standby upgrade requests. This policy recommends a discounted full price, but also a higher standby upgrade price for loyalty customers, which can bring a revenue improvement of up to 19% over a policy ignoring the strategic behavior and 34% over a policy assuming that all customers are strategic -- two reasonable benchmarks without an estimate of the fraction of strategic customers. Our research, thus, provides insights on the potential customer behavioral challenges that a hotel may face with the adoption of a disruptive digital technology, and how existing policies may need to be adjusted for the technology to be successful.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84175420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capacity Pooling in Hospitals: The Hidden Consequences of Off-Service Placement","authors":"Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker, Ryan Graue, Sarah Moravick, Julius J. Yang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3186726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3186726","url":null,"abstract":"Hospital managers struggle with the day-to-day variability in patient admissions to different clinical services, each of which typically has a fixed allocation of hospital beds. In response, many hospitals engage in capacity pooling by assigning patients from a service whose designated beds are fully occupied to an available bed in a unit designated for a different service. This “off-service placement” occurs frequently, yet its impact on patient and operational measures has not been rigorously quantified. This is, in part, because of the challenge of properly accounting for the endogenous selection of off-service patients. We use an instrumental variable approach to quantify the causal effects of off-service placement of hospitalized medical/surgical patients, having accounted for the endogeneity issues. Using data from a large academic medical center with 19.6% of medical/surgical patients placed off service on average, we find that off-service placement is associated with a 22.8% increase in remaining hospital length of stay (LOS) and a 13.1% increase in the likelihood of hospital readmission within 30 days. We find no significant effect on in-hospital mortality or clinical trigger (rapid response) activation. We identify longer distances to the service’s home unit as a key mechanism that drives the effect on LOS. In contrast, a mismatch in nursing specialization does not seem to explain this effect. By quantifying the effects of off-service placement on patient and operational outcomes, we enable clinicians and hospital managers to make better-informed short-term decisions about off-service placement and longer-term decisions about capacity allocation. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80794456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Inventory Policies and Information Sharing: An Efficient Frontier Approach","authors":"René Caldentey, Avi Giloni, C. Hurvich","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3333371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3333371","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a two-tier inventory management system with one retailer and one supplier. The \u0000retailer serves a demand driven by a stationary moving average process (of possibly in nite order) and places periodic inventory replenishment orders to the supplier. In this setting, we study the interplay between information sharing and order smoothing under the assumption that rms' inventory cost parameters (e.g., per unit holding and backordering costs) are functions of two forms of supply chain variability: (i) on-hand inventory variability and (ii) replenishment order variability. We show that there is a natural tension between these two sources of variability and characterize a Pareto frontier\" between them by identifying optimal inventory replenishment strategies that trade-o one type of variability for the other in a cost efficient way. For the case in which the retailer is able to share her complete demand history, we provide a full characterization of the efficient frontier, as well as of an optimal replenishment policy. On the other hand, when the retailer is not able (or willing) to share any demand information we provide a partial characterization of an optimal solution and show that information sharing does not always add value.We also show that the question of identifying conditions under which information sharing does o er value reduces to a delicate analysis of the invertibility (in a time series sense) of a specific stationary process.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84415223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}