Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

TE12

4 - The Tradeoff Between Landed Price and Return Policy Generosity: Seller versus Buyer Perspectives Guangzhi Shang, Florida State University, Department of Marketing, College of Business, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, United States, Alan Pritchard, Robert Windle, Philip Evers Using detailed information on the transaction, product, and seller involved in fixed price (buy-it-now) listings of consumer electronics products from eBay, we estimate the trade-off between landed price and return policy generosity in the online setting. First, the value that online sellers place on a generous return policy is estimated through an evaluation of the prices they charge. Then, buyers’ reactions to return policy and price combinations are identified from the time to sale for each listing. Emerging Topics on Retail Operations Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt Sponsored Session Chair: Mehmet Sekip Altug, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 20052, United States 1 - Cause Marketing: Product Pricing, Design, and Distribution Fei Gao, Indiana University Bloomington, 1309 E. 10th Street, Suite 4100, Bloomington, IN, 47405, United States Cause marketing (CM) is the practice of donating proceeds from product sales to designated charitable causes. We study the product pricing and design decisions in a CM campaign. We also look at the impact of a decentralized supply chain on the effectiveness of a CM campaign. 2 - Pricing and Assortment Strategies with Product Exchanges Laura Wagner, NIF 501082522, Lisbon, 1200/830, Portugal Laura Wagner, Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, 501082522, Lisbon, 1200-830, Portugal, Victor Mart nez de Alb niz Return policies enable consumers to return /exchange products they are unsatisfied with. We develop a search framework where consumers sequentially learn about products’ true value and decide whether to keep, exchange or return them. We show that when pricing is not a decision, the assortment problem does not have a simple structure, but we provide a pseudo-polynomial algorithm to solve it. When pricing is endogenous, the optimization becomes tractable and it is not necessarily optimal to set all products at equal margins. Finally, we find that retailers prefer to pass all return costs on to the consumers, and that this decision can also be beneficial to consumers. 3 - Value of Promotions with Delayed Incentives: An Empirical Investigation of Gift Card Promotions Bharadwaj Kadiyala, HKUST Business School, Hong Kong, Ozalp Ozer, Serdar Simsek Gift card promotions provide customers an incentive to spend more than an expenditure threshold on regularly priced products, by rewarding customers with a gift card. This type of promotion has become popular among luxury fashion, department, and consumer electronic stores. Using a proprietary data set from a large fashion retailer, we investigate how customers’ purchase and expenditure decisions are impacted these promotions as well as the underlying mechanism driving customer response. 4 - Optimal Dynamic Allocation of Sales and Rental Inventory at a Retailer Mehmet Sekip Altug, George Washington University, 2201 G. Street NW, Funger 415, Washington, DC, 20052, United States, Oben Ceryan We consider a retailer that simultaneously sells and rents its product over a given horizon. In every period, the retailer faces uncertain demand that splits between renters and buyers based on their utility. We characterize the optimal dynamic rental allocation policy and study its properties. We propose various implementable heuristics. We then extend our results to the duopoly case and characterize the equilibrium. We derive the conditions that lead to “pure salesö, “pure rental or “mixed strategy equilibrium and discuss their implications. n TE12 North Bldg 126A

n TE13 North Bldg 126B Emerging Topics in Healthcare Operations Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Yuqian Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, 61820, United States 1 - The Interplay Between Online Reviews and Physician Demand: An Empirical Investigation Yuqian Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wohlers Hall 487, 1206 S. 6th St, Champaign, IL, 61820, United States, Mor Armony, Anindya Ghose Social media platforms for healthcare services are changing how patients choose physicians. In this paper, we derive various service-quality proxies from online reviews and study the relationship between these quality proxies and physician demand. To do so, we study a unique data set from one of the leading appointment booking websites in the United States, that contains online physicians’ appointments made over a five-month period, along with other online information. We propose a random coefficient choice model to characterize patient heterogeneity in physician choices, taking into account both numeric and textual user-generated content with text mining techniques. 2 - Reducing Hospital Readmissions through Regulation Tolga Tezcan, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW14SA, United Kingdom, Kenan Arifoglu, Hang Ren We study the effectiveness of Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), which was recently introduced by Medicare. Using a game-theoretical stylized model, we find that HRRP may induce excess healthcare cost. We propose a new compensation scheme that results in socially optimal efforts in reducing readmissions. 3 - How Does Multichannel Delivery Impact Access to a Care We use data from the Aravind Eye Care System in India to examine how the introduction of rural vision centers equipped with telemedicine impacts patient visit volumes, patient mix, revenues, and outcomes. Using a difference-in- differences model, we find that the introduction of vision centers substantially increases network volumes, largely through new patients. We also find that patients substitute telemedicine visits for hospital visits when appropriate. However, we do not find strong evidence of an increase in treatments (e.g., glasses/cataract surgeries). Our findings highlight the multifaceted impact of the introduction of telemedicine on a multi-channel healthcare delivery network. 4 - Maximizing Intervention Effectiveness Brian Rongqing Han, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, Vishal Gupta, Song-Hee Kim, Hyung Paek Without access to the raw data, policymakers often face challenges when deciding whom to receive an intervention previously proven effective. We propose a novel robust optimization framework that uses only causal inference summary data from a published paper to target a subset of the candidate population to maximize intervention effectiveness. n TE14 North Bldg 126C Queues in Services II Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Service Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Amy R. Ward, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0809, United States Co-Chair: Rouba Ibrahim, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom 1 - Off-placing Patients in Hospital Wards: The Value of Flexibility in Healthcare Vahid Sarhangian, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, Carri Chan, Yuan Zhong A common practice in many hospitals is the off-placement of admitted emergency department (ED) patients to a non-primary inpatient ward (IW) when the primary ward is at full capacity. We evaluate and compare the performance of practical flexible designs for routing patients from the ED to IW. We consider a multiclass queueing system with multiple server pools (wards) and allow the Network? Evidence from Telemedicine in South India Kraig Delana, London Business School, Sarang Deo, Kamalini Ramdas

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