Browsing by Subject "Operations management"

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Issues in operations management and marketing interface research : competition, product line design, and channel coordination
(2010-05) Chen, Liwen, 1974-; Gilbert, Stephen M.; Gutierrez, Genaro J.; Balakrishnan, Anant; Feng, Qi; Xia, Yusen
This dissertation studies important issues in supply chain management and marketing interface research: competition, product line design, and channel efficiency, at the presence of vertically differentiated products. Vertical differentiation as a means of price discrimination has been well-studied in both economics and marketing literature. However, less attention has been paid on how vertical differentiation has been operationalized. In this dissertation, we focus our study on two types of vertical differentiation: the one created by a product line which is produced by the same firm, and the one created by products from different firms. We especially are interested in the so-called private label products vs. the national brand products. Specifically, this dissertation explores how vertical differentiation can affect the interactions among the members of a supply chain in several different contexts. In the first piece of work, we use a game theoretic model to explore how the ability of a retailer to introduce a private label product affects its interaction with a manufacturer of a national brand. In the second essay, we are investigating how an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) will be affected by the entry of a competitor when there are strategic suppliers of a critical component. If these suppliers behave strategically, it is not clear that the entry of other players will necessarily be harmful to the incumbent. In the last work, we pay our attention to an emerging change happening in the industry: some retailers begin to sell their private labels through their competitors. We investigate the strategic role of a retailer selling her own private label products through another retailer. In summary, this dissertation illustrates how vertical differentiation play a crucial role in firms' supply chain as well as marketing strategies. Therefore, it is important for firms to recognize these strategic issues related to vertically differentiated products while making operations/marketing decisions.
Risk mitigation strategies for project management, platform development and supply chain design
(2010-12) Tan, Burcu; Anderson, Edward George; Feng, Annabelle (Qi); Dyer, James S.; Parker, Geoffrey G.; Seshadri, Sridhar
This dissertation studies strategies to mitigate the risks associated with operational and strategic decisions of a firm, particularly focusing on project management, product development and procurement decisions. In the first essay we develop two simulation-based methods to evaluate risky capital investment projects that involve managerial flexibility. Many risky projects are characterized by significant demand and operational risks (such as learning curve uncertainty) that are difficult to capture by simple stochastic processes. We propose using system dynamics simulations to estimate the cash flow resulting from these projects and build upon prior work on real options valuation in the decision analysis literature to develop two valuation algorithms. In the second essay we explore the technology investment decisions for platforms in markets that exhibit cross-network effects. We focus on the trade-off firms must make between investing new product development resources to increase a platform's core performance and functionality versus investments designed to leverage the platform's cross-network effects. Abstracting from examples drawn from multiple industries, we use a strategic model to gain intuition about how to make such trade-off decisions under competition. In the third essay, we analyze the optimal procurement strategy of a firm that faces supply and demand risk. In particular, the firm can source from two unreliable suppliers with different delivery characteristics. We study the optimal order allocation policy shaped by the trade-offs between delivery leadtime, reliability and procurement cost. Further, we discuss the value of leadtime flexibility in supply risk mitigation and highlight the role of an inferior supplier in a firm's multi-sourcing strategy. The main contribution of this dissertation to the operations management literature is two-fold. First, it illustrates the role of effective risk mitigation through operational strategies of leadtime flexibility and supply diversification as well as through recognizing managerial flexibility. Second, it highlights the importance of leveraging third-party content development while making technology investment decisions for platforms in two-sided markets.
Three essays on operations management : commodity market, sustainability, and globalization
(2014-05) Park, Seung Jae; Lai, Guoming
This dissertation deals with three issues that are important to many firms, namely, volatile commodity prices, environmental regulations, and globalization. In the first essay I study the benefit and the coordination of inventory sharing when there are two existing channels for procurement, i.e., the spot and forward markets. I propose a method for sharing inventory such that the decentralized firms get the same benefit per unit of the sharing transactions regardless of whether the firm is borrowing or lending. The procurement cost gap between the centralized and decentralized cases is dramatically small by using this method. In the second essay, I analyze whether imposing carbon costs to retailers and consumers changes the supply chain design or social welfare. I consider three types of players who want to maximize different objectives and three kinds of competitive settings. Different from previous studies, I show that the supply chain design is changed significantly by imposing carbon costs especially when market competition is medium to high. In the third essay, I consider long-term / short-term strategies of multi-national corporations. For the long-term strategy, I show that the correlation between the exchange rate and the market demand in a foreign country affects plant location. For the short-term strategy, I show that manufacturers increase the inventory levels as the exchange rate of the country where the plant is located grows weaker. I confirm these results empirically using plant-level data of Korean multi-national corporations provided by the Export-Import Bank of Korea.