This paper describes a maximum principle for distributed parameter systems, i.e. systems characterized by partial differential equations. The maximum principle is applied to solve the problem of a cattle rancher who must decide the number of cattle in different age groups to be bought and sold...

We explore buyback contracts in a supplier-retailer supply chain where the retailer faces a price-dependent downward-sloping demand curve subject to uncertainty. We formulate the problem as a supplier-led Stackelberg game and derive explicitly the equilibrium contract parameters along with the...

A commonly observed two-stage pricing strategy for a custom-made product involves a prepurchase entry fee for a potential consumer and a purchase price if he decides to buy the product. We solve and compare two settings: In the first, the firm does not commit in advance to the second-stage price...

Fixed costs of ordering items or setting up a process arise in many real-life scenarios. In their presence, the most widely used ordering policy in the stochastic inventory literature is the (s, S) policy. Optimality of (s, S) policies and (s, S)-type policies have been investigated for various...

This paper is the first part of a project that will examine the role of MNCs in the transfer of FMS technology. The paper is the result of a hypotheses generating phase conducted largely through a literature review. Multinational corporations (MNCs) are the principal agents of international...

We study the problem of optimal staged purchases of electricity in time-sequential deregulated electricity markets. In recent years, the electricity industry has been deregulated and multiple time-sequential auction markets, such as the block forward, the day-ahead and the hour-of, and the...

This note is concerned with the optimality of an (s; S) policy for a single-item infinite-horizon inventory model when the penalty cost is made-up of two parts: A lump-sum cost independent of the amount of the shortage and a variable cost proportional to the amount of the shortage. Using a...

Business environments change over time. They are cyclic, show seasonality or just evolve over time. This is certainly true for customer demand. As a result, stationary demand distributions are crude approximations of true customer behavior at best. Yet, most classical stochastic inventory models...

This paper investigates the dynamic inventory model for the case when production in a period is restricted to a finite set of specified values. The model allows the production rate to be any value in the set (0, P, 2P, ..., mP), where m is a non-negative integer. It is assumed that the setup...

This paper proposes a new methodology to solve partially observed inventory problems. Generally, these problems have infinitedimensional states that are conditional distribution of the inventory level. Our methodology involves linearizing the state transitions via unnormalized probabilities. It...