The strategic effects of a merger upon supplier interactions

We consider how a merger between two naturally differentiated dealers affects their interactions with a common supplier and identify conditions under which the merger can increase or decrease the combined net worth of the two firms. Among other things, we find that the attractiveness of merging depends upon the extent to which end demand can be stimulated by either an upstream supplier or the dealers. Specifically, the greater the supplier's ability to invest in stimulating end demand, the more likely it is that the naturally differentiated firms will be better off operating independently than merging. On the other hand, if the greatest opportunities for stimulating demand are through the service that is provided by the dealers, then merging their operations will be more attractive. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Dynamic pricing in a dual‐market environment

This article is concerned with the determination of pricing strategies for a firm that in each period of a finite horizon receives replenishment quantities of a single product which it sells in two markets, for example, a long‐distance market and an on‐site market. The key difference between the two markets is that the long‐distance market provides for a one period delay in demand fulfillment. In contrast, on‐site orders must be filled immediately as the customer is at the physical on‐site location. We model the demands in consecutive periods as independent random variables and their distributions depend on the item's price in accordance with two general stochastic demand functions: additive or multiplicative. The firm uses a single pool of inventory to fulfill demands from both markets. We investigate properties of the structure of the dynamic pricing strategy that maximizes the total expected discounted profit over the finite time horizon, under fixed or controlled replenishment conditions. Further, we provide conditions under which one market may be the preferred outlet to sale over the other. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 531–549, 2015     

Equilibrium customer strategies and social–profit maximization in the single‐server constant retrial queue

We consider the single‐server constant retrial queue with a Poisson arrival process and exponential service and retrial times. This system has not waiting space, so the customers that find the server busy are forced to abandon the system, but they can leave their contact details. Hence, after a service completion, the server seeks for a customer among those that have unsuccessfully applied for service but left their contact details, at a constant retrial rate. We assume that the arriving customers that find the server busy decide whether to leave their contact details or to balk based on a natural reward‐cost structure, which incorporates their desire for service as well as their unwillingness to wait. We examine the customers' behavior, and we identify the Nash equilibrium joining strategies. We also study the corresponding social and profit maximization problems. We consider separately the observable case where the customers get informed about the number of customers waiting for service and the unobservable case where they do not receive this information. Several extensions of the model are also discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Some implications of pricing bundles

In this article, we consider a problem in which two suppliers can sell their respective products both individually and together as a bundle, and study the impact of bundle pricing. Four pricing models (centralized, decentralized, coop–comp, and comp–coop) are analyzed with regard to the competition formats and sequences. As one would expect, the firms are always better off when pricing decisions are centralized. However, rather surprisingly, we find that firms may be worse off if the bundle prices are set in a cooperative way; we provide analytical characterization of those instances. Numerical studies show that these insights also hold for some nonlinear demand. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Impact of transfer pricing methods for tax purposes on supply chain performance under demand uncertainty

Transfer pricing refers to the pricing of an intermediate product or service within a firm. This product or service is transferred between two divisions of the firm. Thus, transfer pricing is closely related to the allocation of profits in a supply chain. Motivated by the significant impact of transfer pricing methods for tax purposes on operational decisions and the corresponding profits of a supply chain, in this article, we study a decentralized supply chain of a multinational firm consisting of two divisions: a manufacturing division and a retail division. These two divisions are located in different countries under demand uncertainty. The retail division orders an intermediate product from the upstream manufacturing division and sets the retail price under random customer demand. The manufacturing division accepts or rejects the retail division's order. We specifically consider two commonly used transfer pricing methods for tax purposes: the cost‐plus method and the resale‐price method. We compare the supply chain profits under these two methods. Based on the newsvendor framework, our analysis shows that the cost‐plus method tends to allocate a higher percentage of profit to the retail division, whereas the resale‐price method tends to achieve a higher firm‐wide profit. However, as the variability of demand increases, our numerical study suggests that the firm‐wide and divisional profits tend to be higher under the cost‐plus method than they are under the resale‐price method. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Coordinated pricing and inventory control problems with capacity constraints and fixed ordering cost

This article addresses a single‐item, finite‐horizon, periodic‐review coordinated decision model on pricing and inventory control with capacity constraints and fixed ordering cost. Demands in different periods are random and independent of each other, and their distributions depend on the price in the current period. Each period's stochastic demand function is the additive demand model. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period, and all shortages are backlogged. The objective is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the total expected discounted profit. We show that the profit‐to‐go function is strongly CK‐concave, and the optimal policy has an (s,S,P) ‐like structure. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

Supplier‐buyer contracting: Asymmetric cost information and cutoff level policy for buyer participation

We consider the problem of designing a contract to maximize the supplier's profit in a one‐supplier–one‐buyer relationship for a short‐life‐cycle product. Demand for the finished product is stochastic and price‐sensitive, and only its probability distribution is known when the supply contract is written. When the supplier has complete information on the marginal cost of the buyer, we show that several simple contracts can induce the buyer to choose order quantity that attains the single firm profit maximizing solution, resulting in the maximum possible profit for the supplier. When the marginal cost of the buyer is private information, we show that it is no longer possible to achieve the single firm solution. In this case, the optimal order quantity is always smaller while the optimal sale price of the finished product is higher than the single firm solution. The supplier's profit is lowered while that of the buyer is improved. Moreover, a buyer who has a lower marginal cost will extract more profit from the supplier. Under the optimal contract, the supplier employs a cutoff level policy on the buyer's marginal cost to determine whether the buyer should be induced to sign the contract. We characterize the optimal cutoff level and show how it depends on the parameters of the problem. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 41–64, 2001     

Revenue management under randomly evolving economic conditions

We consider a dynamic pricing model in which the instantaneous rate of the demand arrival process is dependent on not only the current price charged by the concerned firm, but also the present state of the world. While reflecting the current economic condition, the state evolves in a Markovian fashion. This model represents the real‐life situation in which the sales season is relatively long compared to the fast pace at which the outside environment changes. We establish the value of being better informed on the state of the world. When reasonable monotonicity conditions are met, we show that better present economic conditions will lead to higher prices. Our computational study is partially calibrated with real data. It demonstrates that the benefit of heeding varying economic conditions is on par with the value of embracing randomness in the demand process. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 66:73–89,2019     

太空快速响应发射场能力建设

为实现战争行动和突发事件的快速响应目的,太空快速响应发射已成为重要的解决手段。总结传统航天发射场面临的挑战,分析了太空快速响应活动对航天发射场的需求,从发射场建设需求体系、发射场测试能力推进、发射场改造和补充建设、天地一体测控通信体系、快速机动发射模式等提出了发射场建设发展途径,为满足太空快速响应发射场系统建设提供有益的技术参考。     

Revenue maximization in two-station tandem queueing systems

We study optimal pricing for tandem queueing systems with finite buffers. The service provider dynamically quotes prices to incoming price sensitive customers to maximize the long-run average revenue. We present a Markov decision process model for the optimization problem. For systems with two stations, general-sized buffers, and two or more prices, we describe the structure of the optimal dynamic pricing policy and develop tailored policy iteration algorithms to find an optimal pricing policy. For systems with two stations but no intermediate buffer, we characterize conditions under which quoting either a high or a low price to all customers is optimal and provide an easy-to-implement algorithm to solve the problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the developed algorithms with the regular policy iteration algorithm. The work also discusses possible extensions of the obtained results to both three-station systems and two-station systems with price and congestion sensitive customers using numerical analysis.