Search

Can private jets help save lives? Yes. Can short videos nudge next‐of‐kin to donate more? Also, yes. How has an outsider to the transplantation system, with no previous knowledge or expertise in (any aspect of) healthcare, managed to make a difference? Is imagination really more important than knowledge? In this invited article, I will briefly describe two innovations—OrganJet and Nudge Videos—that I have implemented in the US Transplantation System that have extended the lives of many. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accepted by: Aris Syntetos Can mathematical research from a business school professor that is published in academic journals also substantially improve actual industrial practice in global supply chains? Yes. Can mathematics and operations management help improve fairness in access to organ transplants? Yes, again. Can mathematics developed for business applications facilitate the development of new types of quantum hardware? Also, yes. I have three main messages in this invited essay: (1) free yourself from self-imposed constraints and explore a wider range of new problems and arcane mathematics; (2) be bold and imaginative in developing novel solutions and (3) implement your ideas in practice, scaling them with a channel partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Problem definition: We investigate multinational firms' inspection and pricing strategies to address the challenges of combating child labor in global supply chains. We also examine how several factors (such [...]

Abstract. I have enjoyed the opportunities to identify new problems, implement my ideas and algorithms in practice, work closely with start-ups and mature organizations, and build a software company that [...]

Motivated by a collaborative study with one of the most comprehensive ocular imaging programs in the United States, we investigate the underlying three-way trade-off among operational, clinical, and financial considerations in physicians' decisions about ordering imaging tests. Laboratory tests may be processed in parallel and thus have a limited effect on patients' waiting times; imaging tests, by contrast, require patient presence and thus directly influence patients' waiting times. We use a strategic queueing framework to model a physician's decision of ordering imaging tests and show that insurance coverage is the key driver of overtesting. Our further analysis reveals the following: (i) Whereas existing studies hold that lower out-of-pocket expenses lead to higher consumption levels, we refine this statement by showing the copayment and the coinsurance rate drive the consumption in different directions. Thus, simply expanding patient cost sharing is not the solution to overtesting, (ii) Setting a low reimbursement ceiling alone cannot eliminate overtesting, (iii) The joint effect of misdiagnosis concerns and insurance coverage can lead to both overtesting and undertesting even when no reimbursement ceiling exists. These and other results continue to hold under more general conditions and are therefore robust. We enrich our model along two extensions: one with patient heterogeneity in diagnostic precision, and the other with disparities in health insurance coverage. Our findings have implications for other healthcare settings with similar trade-offs. Funding: The authors also thank the National Science Foundation [CMMI1351821 and CMMI1334194] for financial support. Tinglong Dai acknowledges partial financial support from the inaugural Johns Hopkins Discovery Award. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2016.0594. Keywords: queueing games * service operations * healthcare management * consumer behavior * incentives in healthcare operations, 1. Introduction Excessive usage of imaging tests (hereafter referred to as 'overtesting') is generally attributed to either health providers' misaligned monetary incentives (Gawande 2015) or physicians' misdiagnosis concerns, as noted [...]

Motivated by innovative rental business models, we study a rental system with random loss of inventory due to use. We utilize a discrete-time model in which the inventory level is [...]

Counterfeit goods are becoming more sophisticated, from shoes to infant milk powder to aircraft parts, creating problems for consumers, firms, and governments. By comparing two types of counterfeiters--deceptive, so infiltrating [...]

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in augmenting healthcare is expected to grow substantially in future decades. Current research in medical AI focuses on developing, validating, and implementing point‐level AI applications in an ad hoc manner. To harness the full power of AI to improve the patient experience and outcomes at a societal scale, however, requires a gestalt shift—with a systematic understanding of AI in the context of healthcare—and so results in its widespread adoption. This translates to four pillars of incorporating AI into healthcare workflow, including physician buy‐in, patient acceptance, provider investment, and payer support (the "4Ps"). To achieve these 4Ps, it is imperative to design AI‐augmented healthcare delivery systems in view of (1) how physicians integrate AI into their clinical practice and (2) how patients perceive the role of AI in healthcare delivery. This will in turn boost provider investment and payer support. In this paper, we draw from the literature to discuss a series of research questions, including barriers to physician buy‐in and patient acceptance, transparency and disclosure, service design, and strategies for increasing AI uptake. We shed light on the principles of purposeful design for AI‐augmented healthcare delivery systems and propose a research agenda for operations management scholars to consider as they continue to strengthen their engagement with both healthcare professionals and AI developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the literature on inventory management assumes that the demand distribution and the values of its parameters are known with certainty. In this paper, we consider a repeated newsvendor [...]

Over 60% of decedents in the United States have not given first‐person consent for tissue donation; thus, receiving consent from next‐of‐kin (NOK) is a potentially powerful way to improve access to donor tissues. As a more informed NOK is more likely to consent to tissue donation, we introduced the delivery of two alternative videos that discuss the benefits of donation as part of the donation request. One was an animated, freely available video developed by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, and the other was a customized interview‐based video made in partnership with the Nevada Donor Network. We focused our analysis on studying the effect on White donation rates; many historical factors (in the United States) make the kind of simple, minimal intervention we implemented unlikely to be sufficient to encourage non‐White donation. We found in the field experiment that NOKs were more likely to donate if they viewed either video but that the two videos were not statistically different in their effect. As those who viewed a video may have been predisposed to donate, we additionally performed an online experiment that does not suffer from this endogeneity concern. We found results parallel to those in the field, and based on written comments by participants, we found suggestive evidence that the informational content in the videos was the mechanism that led to increased donation willingness and not emotional connectivity. We have identified a cheap and easy‐to‐implement intervention that could improve tissue availability across the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: Omnichannel retailing has led to the use of traditional stores as fulfillment centers for online orders. Omnichannel fulfillment problems have two components: (1) accepting a certain number of online orders prior to seeing store demands and (2) satisfying (or filling) some of these accepted online demands as efficiently as possible with any leftover inventory after store demands have been met. Hence, there is a fundamental trade-off between store cancellations of accepted online orders and potentially increased profits because of more acceptances of online orders. We study this joint problem of online order acceptance and fulfillment (including cancellations) to minimize total costs, including shipping charges and cancellation penalties in single-period and limited multiperiod settings. Academic/practical relevance: Despite the growing importance of omnichannel fulfillment via online orders, our work provides the first study incorporating cancellation penalties along with fulfillment costs. Methodology: We build a two-stage stochastic model. In the first stage, the retailer sets a policy specifying which online orders it will accept. The second stage represents the process of fulfilling online orders after the uncertain quantities of in-store purchases are revealed. We analyze threshold policies that accept online orders as long as the inventories are above a global threshold, a local threshold per region, or a hybrid. Results: For a single period, total costs are unimodal as a function of the global threshold and unimodal as a function of a single local threshold holding all other local thresholds at constant values, motivating a gradient search algorithm. Reformulating as an appropriate linear program with network flow structure, we estimate the derivative (using infinitesimal perturbation analysis) of the total cost as a function of the thresholds. We validate the performance of the threshold policies empirically using data from a high-end North American retailer. Our two-location experiments demonstrate that local thresholds perform better than global thresholds in a wide variety of settings. Conversely, in a narrow region with negatively correlated online demand between locations and very low shipping costs, global threshold outperforms local thresholds. A hybrid policy only marginally improves on the better of the two. In multiple periods, we study one- and two-location models and provide insights into effective solution methods for the general case. Managerial implications: Our methods provide effective algorithms to manage fulfillment costs for online orders, demonstrating a significant reduction over policies that treat each location separately and reflecting the significant advantage of incorporating shipping in computing thresholds. Numerical studies provide insights as to why local thresholds perform well in a wide variety of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an environment where a buyer procures capacity from a capacitated supplier through a wholesale price contract, the impact of timing of the decisions and of additional demand information on the supplier's pricing and the buyer's procurement decisions are investigated. As the selling season approaches, the buyer and the supplier have better information about the demand process. It is questioned as to what degree waiting until the demand uncertainty is resolved--given that such an option is feasible--is the best alternative for the supply chain partners. The main model is a two-period dynamic pricing/procurement game where the supplier sets wholesale prices dynamically; he sets the second period price after seeing the demand state as well as the buyer's first period procurement quantity. Two single-period models based on the information available to the players prior to their decisions are also studied. For each model, the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium is found in a closed form and the players' behaviors are analyzed to determine the impact of the additional information and trading periods on their welfare. The supplier's optimal capacity decision is also considered. Several additional insights are obtained through numerical experiments. Keywords: Stochastic price-sensitive demand, wholesale price contract, strategic interactions, advance capacity purchase, dynamic pricing/procurement., 1. Introduction Advance capacity purchase by buyers is an increasingly common practice in supply chain management that effectively accommodates and manages production in the presence of demand uncertainty. For example, [...]