In this paper,we investigate the pricing and return policy issueof one-echelon green supply chain, contain a manufacture who produces two type of products: green and non-green products. These products have a same functional but in selling price and environmentally issues have different effects. Also we consider return policy for both products that can stimulate the customer valuation. We develo...

In online direct selling, a customer will not experience the product when making the purchase decision. Concerns about product quality and the return policy may prevent the customer from buying the product. In this paper, we develop several theoretical models to examine the impact of online distributor's return policy, product quality and pricing strategy on the customer's purchase and the retu...

A newsboy model in which a vendor has a limited budget to procure the required items is developed. It is assumed that the manufacturer will either sell the items to the vendor outright or offer the items to the vendor with return policy. In the latter case, the manufacturer buys back from the vendor the unsold items at the end of the selling season. This study considers one item with budget con...

We propose the Ω-return as an alternative to the λ-return currently used by the TD(λ) family of algorithms. The benefit of the Ω-return is that it accounts for the correlation of different length returns. Because it is difficult to compute exactly, we suggest one way of approximating the Ω-return. We provide empirical studies that suggest that it is superior to the λ-return and γ-return for a v...

Batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms attempt to choose a policy from a designer-provided class of policies given a fixed set of training data. Choosing the policy which maximizes an estimate of return often leads to over-fitting when only limited data is available, due to the size of the policy class in relation to the amount of data available. In this work, we focus on learning policy ...

BACKGROUND This study aims to determine the nature of United States Institutional Review Board (IRB) policy in a broad spectrum of research settings regarding the return of results to study participants. METHOD IRB policies or standard operating procedures of 207 Medical School, Industry and Non-medical School IRBs were examined on-line to determine if they incorporated specific reference to ...