Among practitioners, inventory is often thought to be the root of all evil in operations management. The stock market hates it, the media abhors it, and managers have come to fear it. But high inventory levels can also be the result of strategic buying and high-availability strategies. The...

Participants in a market, buyers and sellers, may need the service of an intermediary who will put them into contact and give them information about their potential trading partner. The intermediary chooses what price it will charge to each side to have access to its service. It also chooses...

Quite often, a firm has to decide between investing in a safe project (``small'') where rewards and losses remain moderate and a risky alternative (``big'') where the rewards and the losses are larger. We study such a choice in a context where the probability of success depends both on the...