Manufacturing Engineering最新文献

{"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":"Consumer Return Policies in Omnichannel Operations","authors":"Leela Nageswaran, Soo-Haeng Cho, Alan Scheller-Wolf","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3046206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3046206","url":null,"abstract":"We study the pricing and return policy decisions of an omnichannel retailer serving customers who differ in how they realize their uncertain valuation for a product—by inspecting in store before purchase or by purchasing online and possibly returning misfit products. Customers may return misfit products either to stores for a full refund or online as per the firm’s return policy. We model prices to be identical across channels, allow crosschannel returns, and endogenize customers’ purchase and return decisions, capturing typical features of an omnichannel setting. Our analysis helps explain why some omnichannel firms choose full refunds, whereas others charge a fee for online returns. We find that omnichannel firms with good salvage partners for online returns (e.g., Nordstrom) as well as those with more store-based customers (e.g., Macy’s) should offer full refunds. Similarly, firms are incentivized to offer full refunds for products that customers are more likely to inspect in store (e.g., Express for footwear). In contrast, firms with a significant store network and better in-store salvage opportunities (e.g., J.C. Penney) might be better off charging a fee for online returns in order to nudge customers to return in store. Finally, an omnichannel firm should be cautious both in making the return process more convenient and in improving accessibility to its stores, because these seemingly beneficial policies, if combined with a partial-refund policy, could undermine the firm’s overall profit. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84675682","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":"Reducing Contract Management Challenges in Public Sector Procurement in Zimbabwe","authors":"Anthony Tapiwa Mazikana","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3443938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3443938","url":null,"abstract":"The State Procurement Board procedures and the public procurement process have been criticized for much of the lagging behind of government projects, such as the construction of roads, provision of clean water and sewer reticulation, amongst others (The Herald, 20 January 2018). The awarding of tenders for various projects has resulted in the delay or non-completion of crucial projects. This study aims to investigate the public procurement process in Zimbabwe, identify procurement challenges in the Zimbabwe public sector that detract from service delivery and suggest strategies to reduce contract management challenges in public sector procurement. The study adopted a mixed approach to research. The systematic random sampling method was adopted to select respondents for quantitative research while the purposive method was adopted to select respondents for qualitative research. The SPSS version 20.0 was adopted to analyse quantitative data while the reduction method was used for qualitative data. Findings reveal that there is no standard meaning for contract management in public sector procurement. The study revealed that to avoid delays in supply and provision of services, electronic-procurement (E-procurement) was pointed out as one of the solutions as that can enhance transparency of the procurement process, efficiency and policy coherence. Poor planning was also identified as one of the challenges of public procurement. The study recommended that Public sector organizations should adopt a strategic approach to contract management practices.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75302815","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":"Admission Control Biases in Hospital Unit Capacity Management: How Occupancy Information Hurdles and Decision Noise Impact Utilization","authors":"Song-Hee Kim, Jordan D. Tong, C. Peden","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3219451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3219451","url":null,"abstract":"Providing patients with timely care from the appropriate unit involves both correct clinical evaluation of patient needs and making admission decisions to effectively manage a unit with limited capacity in the face of stochastic patient arrivals and lengths of stay. We study human decision behavior in the latter operations management task. Using behavioral models and controlled experiments in which physicians and MTurk workers manage a simulated hospital unit, we identify cognitive and environmental factors that drive systematic admission decision bias. We report on two main findings. First, seemingly innocuous “occupancy information hurdles” (e.g., having to type a password to view current occupancy) can cause a chain of events that leads physicians to maintain systematically lower unit utilization. Specifically, these hurdles cause physicians to make most admission decisions without checking the current unit occupancy. Then—between the times that they do check—physicians underestimate the number of available beds when occupancy increases from admissions are more salient than occupancy decreases from discharges. Second, decision-related random error or “noise” leads to higher- or lower-than-optimal utilization of hospital units in predictable patterns, depending on the system parameters. We provide evidence that these patterns are due to some settings providing more opportunity for physicians to mistakenly admit patients and other settings that provide more opportunity to mistakenly reject patients. These findings help identify when and why clinicians are likely to make inefficient decisions because of human cognitive limitations and suggest mitigation strategies to help hospital units improve their capacity management. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90692279","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":"Reviews and Self-selection Bias with Operational Implications","authors":"Ningyuan Chen, Anran Li, K. Talluri","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3407477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3407477","url":null,"abstract":"Reviews for products and services written by previous consumers have become an influential input to the purchase decision of customers. Many service businesses monitor the reviews closely for feedback as well as detecting service flaws, and they have become part of the performance review for service managers with rewards tied to improvement in the aggregate rating. Many empirical papers have documented a bias in the aggregate ratings, arising because of customers’ inherent self-selection in their choices and bounded rationality in evaluating previous reviews. Although there is a vast empirical literature analyzing reviews, theoretical models that try to isolate and explain the bias in ratings are relatively few. Assuming consumers simply substitute the average rating that they see as a proxy for quality, we give a precise characterization of the self-selection bias on ratings of an assortment of products when consumers confound ex ante innate preferences for a product or service with ex post experience and service quality and do not separate the two. We develop a parsimonious choice model for consumer purchase decisions and show that the mechanism leads to an upward bias, which is more pronounced for niche products. Based on our theoretical characterization, we study the effect on pricing and assortment decisions of the firm when potential customers purchase based on the biased ratings. Our results give insights into how quality, prices, and customer feedback are intricately tied together for service firms. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management.","PeriodicalId":49886,"journal":{"name":"Manufacturing Engineering","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89276593","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}