2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

TA32

INFORMS Nashville – 2016

2 - Question-and-answer Forums For Product Support: Crowdsourcing Service To Customers

dependencies results in a substantial improvement of the predictive power, in comparison with the standard auto-regressive approach. 4 - Financing Sellers Via E-commerce Platform In The Presence Of Seller Competition Long Ren, Tsinghua University, renl.12@sem.tsinghua.edu.cn, Lingxiu Dong Small-business sellers selling products via e-retailing platforms (e.g., Amazon.com, eBay, Taobao) operate under consignment-revenue-sharing (commission) contracts, under which the seller decides his product portfolio, inventory, and selling price. Many of those sellers face capital constraints that limit their ability to build inventory, expand product offerings. We investigate the effect of e-commerce platform backed financing on sellers’ operational decisions and the competition landscape. TA32 203A-MCC Revenue Mgt, Pricing I Contributed Session Chair: Syed Asif Raza, Qatar University, College of Business and Economics, Doha, 2713, Qatar, syedar@qu.edu.qa 1 - Reputation-based Pricing In E-commerce Retailing renato-dematta@uiowa.edu, Timothy Joe Lowe, Dengfeng Zhang We examine a revenue management problem involving an online seller of a seasonal product in an e-commerce setting where consumers are sensitive to both price and seller service rating. This rating is the aggregated consumer perception of service quality and is used as a reputation indicator in setting prices. Using a Markov decision process to model the problem over a finite horizon, we examine the impact of changes in seller service rating and consumer heterogeneity on the seller’s optimal pricing policy and expected revenues. Using simulated market settings, we validate our model and compare our pricing policy with two other competing policies. 2 - Research On Pricing Decision Of Remanufacturing Considering Product Disassemblability And Recycling Quality Uncertainty Juhong Gao, Dr., College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Building 25-A No.92 Weijin Road, Nankai, Tianjin, 300072, China, gaojuhong@tju.edu.cn, Mengmeng Li In this paper, the target of CLSC is to realize the members’ profit maximization considering product disassemblability and recycling quality uncertainty. The four different remanufacturing models have been analyzed and the coordination mechanism has been introduced, in which the separation and cooperation model of OEM and IO. Research shows the members obtain less profit when both of OEM and IO are involved into remanufacturing. And OEM’s profit is higher in centralized decision; IO still prefers to give up part of the profit and to participate in the cooperation model considering that IO is more easily to be driven out of remanufacturing market by OEM in decentralized decision. 3 - Dynamic Pricing In China’s Largest E-retailer JD.com Dongdong Ge, Professor, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, School of Information management and eng, 777 Guoding Road, Shanghai, 200433, China, dongdong@gmail.com In China’s largest E-Retailer JingDong(JD.com), there are 20 millions SKUs on sale and 3 million orders made every day. Dynamic pricing in this gigantic system has been recognized a vital issue in company’s revenue management operations. In this talk, we briefly introduce our data-driven optimization models and findings with JD.com. We also report our A/B test result, which shows a great improvement in GMV/GP. 4 - Economic Order Quantity Models For Joint Pricing And Greening Effort Decisions With Discounts Syed Asif Raza, Qatar University, College of Business and Economics, Doha, 2713, Qatar, syedar@qu.edu.qa Environmental protection and greening concerns have gained greatly emphasis both at the procedures and consumers alike. Nowadays, customers are often willing to pay a premium for environmentally friendly products, however, the investment in greening effort by a firm must yield profitability to a firm. This required the use of contemporary tools from Revenue Management (RM) and pricing. Economic order quantity (EOQ) models are among the most studied in inventory management context. This paper develops EOQ models with joint pricing, greening effort (investment) decision in an RM context. Efficient solution procedure is also proposed to consider the quantity discount in the EOQ models analysis. Renato E de Matta, Associate Professor, University of Iowa, 2360 Mulberry Street, Coralville, IA, 52241, United States,

Konstantinos Stouras, INSEAD, konstantinos.stouras@insead.edu Online product support forums where customers can post complaints and questions, or report issues about a product or service of a firm abound. A large number of companies choose to crowdsource their product and service support back to their customers, employing a few dedicated service operators. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of such a novel business model for service and compare it with a call center model. 3 - Scale, Scope And Hospital Productivity: An Empirical Study Of Volume Spillovers Across Hospital Services Michael Freeman, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, mef35@cam.ac.uk, Nicos Savva, Stefan Scholtes Demand pressures mean that hospitals are increasingly getting bigger (i.e. treat more patients per year) and also more complex (i.e. see patients with more diverse care needs). Although prior work has shown that increased volume is positively associated with patient outcomes, the relationship between volume, complexity, and costs is less-well understood. This paper uses a detailed panel of 130 hospitals in England over a period of nine years to examine the relationship between scale and costs in hospitals by investigating spillovers between treating together related (e.g. same service line, same degree of urgency) and unrelated (e.g. different service lines, different urgency) activity. 4 - Finding A Needle In A Haystack: The Effects Of Searching And Learning On Pick-worker Performance Robert Batt, Assistant Professor, Wisconsin School of Business, UW-Madison, Madison, WI, United States, bob.batt@wisc.edu, Santiago Gallino We use a unique dataset from an online apparel retailer to estimate the magnitude of intra-bin search time and what operational and behavioral factors affect it. We find that intra-bin search time increases with both the number of items in the bin and the density of items in the bin (i.e., items per foot). Further, we find that the deleterious effects of bin load and density are attenuated by worker experience. More experienced workers are less impacted by bin load and density than are less experienced workers. We use simulation to show that incorporating these bin load and experience effects into pick assignments and routing can lead to meaningful improvements in pick times. Supply Chain Finance and Risk Management Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt, iFORM Sponsored Session Chair: Wei Luo, IESE Business School, Av. Pearson 21, Barcelona, n/a, Spain, wluo@iese.edu 1 - The Effectiveness Of Supplier Buy Back Finance: Evidence From Chinese Automobile Industry Weiming Zhu, University of Maryland, weimingzhu@rhsmith.umd.edu Facing a budget-constrained buyer, a novel approach for large suppliers is adopting buy-back financing schemes to relieve their downstream partners and reduce channel costs. Through counterfactual analysis, we analyze the efficiency of these financing schemes. We find that such contract agreements can improve channel efficiency over traditional financing methods. 2 - Suppliers As Liquidity Providers Panos Markou, IE Business School, pmarkou.phd2016@Student.ie.edu, Daniel S Corsten, Reint Gropp Using a data set of private and public French firms and their suppliers, we examine how supplier financial constraint affects buyer cash holdings. When external financing is costly or unavailable, firms rely on their suppliers for backup liquidity, freeing up cash. Using matching estimators, we show that constrained buyers with unconstrained suppliers hold less cash than buyers with constrained suppliers. This effect persists during the financial crisis, highlighting that suppliers may be viable liquidity sources when banks are not. Finally, not only do buyers with unconstrained suppliers hold less cash, but they adjust cash holdings downwards following a supplier IPO. 3 - Financial Fluctuations Through Dynamic Networks Stefano Nasini, IESEG School of Management, Paris/Lille, France, s.nasini@ieseg.fr, Mireia Giné, Miguel Antón Decisions and outcomes of listed enterprises are strongly related by different types of associations, such as supply-chain, competition and partnership. In the context of financial stock markets, we introduce a network-based econometric framework to explain cross-section dependencies of stock prices. After a detailed analysis of the proposed methodology, estimation and forecast are carried out, based on the COMPUSTAT data set (with information about supply-chain, competition and partnership between U.S. listed companies). The inclusion of these pairwise TA31 202C-MCC

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