2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

WC74

INFORMS Nashville – 2016

WC74 Legends B- Omni Ops Mgt/Marketing III Contributed Session

2 - The Effect Of Agricultural Subsidy Policy on The Land Scale Management Of Farmers Xuechen Meng, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai, China, xuechenmeng@126.com Based on the Nerlove adaptive expectations model and the dynamic panel GMM model, this paper studies the impact of subsidies on farming land scale operation. Results show that when controlling for other factors that influence the conditions of land scale, agricultural subsidies only has a slight positive impact on expanding land scale, the effect mainly reflects in the main producing area while negative on the sales areas. This paper also examines the impact of main producing subsidies on difference kinds of crops and finds that the effect of subsidies on wheat plantings are greater than corn and rice, indicating the importance of precisely target subsidies in the future. 3 - Discounting Long-term Public Investments Under Model Uncertainty Dowon Kim, PhD Student, KAIST, Guseng Dong, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of, kimdowon@kaist.ac.kr, Kyoung-Kuk Kim, Jiwoong Lee This paper proposes a new approach to deal with social discount rates for long- term public investments. Using the recursive-utility framework, we explicitly account for consumption inequality aversion, risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion. In addition, the proposed approach overcomes limitations of two-period models in the literature. As an illustration, estimation results are presented based on binomial lattices and IPCC emission scenarios data.

Chair: Xiuli He, Associate Professor, UNC-Charlotte, 1207 Doughty Place, Sugar Land, TX, 77479, United States, xhe8@uncc.edu 1 - Selling To An Off-price Retailer To Ration Inventory For Strategic Consumers Moutaz J Khouja, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, BISOM Department, College of Business, Charlotte, NC, 28223, United States, mjkhouja@uncc.edu, Jing Zhou, Xin Liu Strategic consumers are likely to delay purchases when retailers have large inventory. Retailers can reduce this inventory by selling some of it to off-price retailers. If an off-price retailer has many bargain-hunters, such a strategy may be beneficial to the retailer in mitigating the effects of strategic consumer behavior. 2 - Multi-agent Salesforce Compensation With Supply Chain Considerations Sandra Transchel, Kuehne Logistics University, Grosser Grasbrook 17, Hamburg, 20457, Germany, Sandra.Transchel@the-klu.org, Kristoph Kurt Reinhard Ullrich, Ruud Teunter, Jasper Veldman We study the impact of limited inventory on sales force incentive contracts and the induced efforts of firms which employ multiple sales agents. We show that if demand is censored by inventory levels, pooling inventory may lead to a free- riding problem of the sales agents. This implies that, on the one hand, firms face reduced cost by pooling inventory, but on the other hand, they may face lower sales because of lower efforts exerted by their agents. 3 - Vegetable Equity: Insights From Agri-food Supply Chain Innovations In Emerging Economies Fei Qin, Assistant Professor, Oakland University, 2200 North Squirrel Road, Rochester, MI, 48309-4401, United States, qinfei99@gmail.com, Saibal Ray, Mehmet Gumus We build an analytical model to examine the impact of VK Agri-food supply chain intervention on fruits and fresh vegetables prices and social welfares. We find that while a supply chain innovation like VK may be good for consumers or even for bringing more farmers into the market system, one of its main goals - improving the financial condition of all farmers - may not be true. We explore sample data to test a list of hypotheses, and in this regard, elicit the impact of VK intervention on the prices and sales as well as farmer’s welfare. 4 - Personal Fabrication We study the idea of personal fabrication and its implications for firms. We propose and analyze a mechanism, through which, firms can benefit from personal fabrication. 5 - Product Quality Strategy With Consumer Heterogeneity Of Technology Platform Xiuli He, Associate Professor, UNC-Charlotte, 1207 Doughty Place, Sugar Land, TX, 77479, United States, xhe8@uncc.edu, Yong Zha, Subodha Kumar, Lu Zhang We study the firm’s optimal quality strategy when selling a base product and a complementary platform. We consider two cost structures of platform quality and two consumer valuations along the platform quality. WC75 Legends C- Omni Economics III Contributed Session Chair: Dowon Kim, KAIST, Guseng Dong, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of, kimdowon@kaist.ac.kr 1 - Optimal Subsidy And Tax Policy And Consumer Environmental Awareness Jie Zhang, University of Texas, 701 South West Street, Arlington, TX, 76019, United States, jiezhang@uta.edu, Linghong Zhang This paper investigates the optimal subsidy and tax policies in response to different consumer environmental awareness (CEA) and firms’ product selection (generic, green or both), plus quality and pricing decisions. We investigated all the equilibria under different policy combinations and derived the analytical and numerical solutions. Nagarajan Sethuraman, PhD Student, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, United States, Nagarajan_Sethuraman@kenan-flagler.unc.edu, Ali Kemal Parlakturk, Jayashankar M Swaminathan

WC76 Legends D- Omni Applied Probability III Contributed Session

Chair: Kaan Kuzu, Assistant Professor, Univ of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Sheldon B Lubar School of Business, P.O. Box 742, Milwaukee, WI,

53201-0742, United States, kuzu@uwm.edu 1 - Non Stationary Gaussian Process Bandits

Ankur Mani, University of Minnesota, 808 Berry St. Apt. 410, St. Paul, MN, 55114, United States, amani@umn.edu, Ashish Kapoor, Eric Horvitz We study the non-stationary version of the correlated multi-armed bandit problem where the correlations between the rewards from different bandits and at different times are captured by a Gaussian process. We identify the rate at which the optimal regret grows and provide an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret. 2 - Valuing Optimal Switching Options With The Moving-boundary Method Arun Chockalingam, Eindhoven University of Technology, Hoog Gagel 62, Eindhoven, 5611BG, Netherlands, a.chockalingam@tue.nl, Taimaz Soltani, Shaunak Dabadghao, Jan C Fransoo The contribution of this paper is extending the Moving Boundary Method to tackle the optimal-switching problem. The Moving Boundary Method has been successfully applied to optimal-stopping problems. Optimal-switching problems can be thought of as sequences of optimal-stopping problems and possess complicating features, making an extension of the Moving-Boundary Method to tackle such problems non-trivial. The method is then applied to problems in the sourcing and energy domains. 3 - Random Dimensional Spaces Kemal Gursoy, Professor, Rutgers University, 100 Rockafeller Road, Room 5146, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, United States, kgursoy@rci.rutgers.edu In this work, a probability law for random dimensional spaces was investigated. Where points could appear and disappear randomly. Consequently, the dimension of a space would be continuously translated from a real number to another one. Therefore, the main interest is to identify persistent properties of the space, under all possible continuous transformations. 4 - Analysis Of Customer Abandonment In Ticket Queues: A Bayesian Approach Kaan Kuzu, Assistant Professor, Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sheldon B Lubar School of Business, P.O. Box 742, Milwaukee, WI, 53201-0742, United States, kuzu@uwm.edu, Refik Soyer Ticket queue systems collect interval censored data for customer abandonment. The abandonment of a customer is only realized when the ticket for that customer is called for service and the customer does not show up. We present a modulated Poisson process model to analyze customer abandonments in ticket queues. A Bayesian analysis of the model is developed considering covariates such as branch and weekday. The proposed model and the methodology are implemented using real ticket queue data. We show the heterogeneity in customer abandonments and provide insights on server allocation policies.

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