Procurement of manufactured goods and sub-assemblies from distant markets is not a recent phenomenon. Countries with significantly lower labor costs have been providing new opportunities for the large firms of the developed countries for decades. Although it makes higher margins possible for the big brand owners in the domestic and global retail markets, there are obvious risks such as the ones...

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

Simple additive weighting is a well-known method for scoring and ranking alternative options based on multiple attributes. However the pitfalls associated with this approach are not widely appreciated. For example, the apparently innocuous step of normalizing the various attribute data in order to obtain comparable figures leads to markedly different rankings depending on which normalization is...

Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration ...

An Economic Lot-sizing(ELS) problem with perishable inventory has been studied extensively over the years and plays a fundamental role in the inventory management. In this paper, we consider the problem where backlogging is allowed with the general economies of scale cost functions. Since the special case without backlogging is NP-hard, the considered problem is also NP-hard. The main contribut...

This paper studies the computation of order up to levels for a stochastic programming inventory problem of a perishable product. Finding a solution is a challenge as the problem enhances a perishable product, fixed ordering cost and non-stationary stochastic demand with a service level constraint. An earlier study [6] derived order-up-to values via an MILP approximation. We consider a computati...

The Supply Chain Integrated Ordering Network (SCION) Depot Bookings system automates the planning and scheduling of perishable and non-perishable commodities and the vehicles that carry them into J. Sainsbury depots. This is a strategic initiative, enabling the business to make the key move from weekly to daily ordering. The system is mission critical, managing the inwards flow of commodities f...

We propose a methodology useful for food services, allowing contribution margins to be optimized. This is based on statistical tools, inventory models and financial indicators. To reduce the gap between theory and practice, we apply this methodology to the case study of a Chilean company to show its potential. We conduct a real-world demand data analysis for perishable and non-perishable produc...

With effect of consumer factor considered, a model for dynamic pricing of perishable products is proposed. By this model, we obtained a property of the value function: marginal value is a decreasing function of the capacity and an increasing function of the consumer factor. Basing on this property, we proposed the following pricing strategy: according to the regions that the perishable products...