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To increase the efficiency of last-mile delivery, online retailers can adopt pickup points in their operations. The retailer may then incentivize customers to steer them from home to pickup point delivery to reduce costs. However, it is usually uncertain whether the customer accepts this incentive to switch to pickup delivery. This setup gives rise to a new last-mile delivery problem with integrated incentive and routing decisions under uncertainty. We model this problem as a two-stage stochastic program with decision-dependent uncertainty. In the first stage, a retailer decides which customers to incentivize. However, customers’ reaction to the incentive is stochastic: they may accept the offer and switch to pickup point delivery, or they may decline the offer and stick with home delivery. In the second stage, after customers’ final delivery choices are revealed, a vehicle route is planned to serve customers via the delivery option of their choice. We develop an exact branch-and-bound algorithm and propose several heuristics to improve the algorithm’s scalability. Our algorithm solves instances with up to 50 customers, realizing on average 4%–8% lower last-mile delivery costs compared with the commonly applied approaches in the industry that do not use incentives or offer incentives to all customers. We also develop a benchmark policy that gives very fast solutions with a 2% average optimality gap for small instances and up to 2% average cost increase compared with the heuristic solutions.

This guide focuses on two interrelated areas of developing vocational education curricula: designing a thematic curriculum and using the "all aspects of the industry" approach when creating thematic curricula. The following are among the topics discussed in the guide's eight sections: principles of the thematic curriculum and its potential to improve education; curriculum options (understanding the impact of change, identifying potential barriers to change, making change happen, identifying and examining options); contextual options (individual courses, clusters and majors, career academies, magnet schools, strengths and limitations of contextual options); organizational options (traditional arrangements, tech prep, integration, school-to-work transition); delivery options (school-based enterprises, linkages and partnerships, job shadowing, mentoring, youth apprenticeships, portfolios, senior projects); content options (documenting needs and identifying, selecting, organizing, integrating, and updating content); strategies for linking curriculum with instruction (school- and work-based teaching and learning strategies and strategies connecting school and workplace); and steps in assessing and refining the curriculum (gathering, examining, and using assessment information for curriculum improvement). A total of 22 figures and 103 references are spread throughout the document. Appended are the following: sample themes; examples of content organized around themes; sample career clusters/pathways/majors; examples of theme-wide functions, issues, concerns, and technological knowledge and skills; and an annotated bibliography of 29 related materials, reports, and resources. (MN)

Problem definition: In an environment where consumers’ rising valuation of Instagrammable memories drives their spending from products to experiences, retailers offer experiences to attract consumers back to their stores. Yet, it is not obvious under which settings consumers can benefit from these experiences and raise retailers’ profits. Methodology/results: We use a random utility model for consumer choice in both monopoly and duopoly settings. For the latter, we pose a game-theoretic model to analyze the equilibrium prices, profits, and consumer welfare for various problem cases. We show that medium-quality experiences can lower the product sales and store traffic below the level when no experience is offered. Sufficiently low- or high-quality experiences overcome this issue, making the consumers better off. Yet, the former presents the only profitable option when a single retailer in the market offers an experience. In contrast, when both retailers adopt experiences, low-quality experiences may not be profitable, and the retailers would need to adopt even higher-quality experiences, which lead to a “win-win-win” outcome for the two retailers and consumers. A fee structure for the experience elevates retailer profits but can turn stores into outlets where consumers visit to purchase experiences and not products. When experiential retailing is the common practice in the market, it enables “win-win-win” outcomes when free experiences fail. Managerial implications: Being the first to study this new retail format, our results contribute to the ongoing debate on the settings under which experiential offerings are beneficial for the retailers and consumers and highlight that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Our results show that experiences affect main product sales in nonobvious ways, especially in competitive markets. In a (post-)pandemic world where retailers try to attract consumers back to stores, we offer insights that can guide retailers in the process.

This paper studies a production-routing problem with price-dependent demand (PRP-PD). The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) and solved within an outer approximation (OA) framework where the primal and master problems are solved iteratively. In order to solve the computationally expensive master problem, which is a mixed-integer program (MIP), four different rolling horizon-based heuristics are developed. The efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithms is benchmarked against the existing methods in the literature to solve the PRP-PD for both linear and nonlinear demand functions. Our results show that by adopting proper freezing and simplification strategies, the rolling horizon-based heuristic can solve the large problem instances significantly faster than the existing methods in the literature, with little to no reduction in solution quality. For large problem instances with linear demand functions, the proposed heuristic provides solutions within 1.5-3 min. The quality of these solutions deviates at most 3.5% from the solutions provided by the existing exact methods, which take more than 2 h. Our solutions are also higher in quality compared to the near-optimal solutions provided in the literature, and they are achieved with a 90% reduction in computational time. With nonlinear demand functions, one-third of the instances require more than 2 h to be solved by the exact methods in the literature, while they are solved within 0.5-3.5 min using our heuristic, with less than 2% deviation in solution quality.

Outlines the National Association for Industrial Technical Teacher Educators standards for professional development, instruction, curriculum, special populations students, laboratory organization and management, linkages with stakeholder groups, and positive public status and image. Describes three levels of teacher proficiency: associate, qualified, and master teachers. (SK)

We study supplier–buyer relationships in smallholder agri-food supply chains with equity concerns and under stakeholder engagement. We develop a game theoretic model to study the impact of these socially responsible practices in investment and pricing decisions. We model this as a Stackelberg game and study the impacts of the power structure in the outcomes. Our work was motivated by the business model of socially responsible Mexican company Fractal Café. We provide closed form expressions for the optimal wholesale and retail prices, and numerically study the effect of the model parameters. We show that equity concerns drive a redistribution of the profit towards an equitable outcome, but they do not have the same effect on the investment decisions. Additionally, we show that equity concerns may reverse the advantage of the game leader and transfer utility to the follower. We identify the settings under which the introduction of socially responsible practices increases the total supply chain profit by reducing the double marginalization effect. We find that capacity constraints result in a higher retail price, achieved by increasing the leader’s margin. Finally, we show that a two-part tariff contract with equity concerns is only convenient for the game follower when the leader has a high concern for advantageous inequity.

A production-routing problem with price-dependent demand (PRP-PD) is studied in this paper. Demand follows a general convex, differentiable, continuous and strictly decreasing function in price. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP). Two Outer Approximation (OA) based algorithms are developed to solve the PRP-PD. The efficiency of the proposed algorithms in comparison with commercial MINLP solvers is demonstrated. The computational results show that our basic OA algorithm outperforms the commercial solvers both in solution quality and in computational time aspects. On the other hand, our extended (two-phase) OA algorithm provides near-optimal solutions very efficiently, especially for large problem instances. These findings prevail both for linear and for nonlinear demand functions. Additional sensitivity analyses are conducted to investigate the impact of different problem parameters on the optimal solution. The results show that the manufacturer should give higher priority to the retailer who has lower price sensitivity and who is closer to the manufacturer. Another takeaway is that a larger market size and a lower price sensitivity lead to more profit.

Double-peaked narrow emission lines in active galactic nucleus (AGN) spectra can be produced by AGN outflows, rotation, or dual AGNs, which are AGN pairs in ongoing galaxy mergers. Consequently, double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines are useful tracers of the coevolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes, as driven by AGN feedback and AGN fueling. We investigate this concept further with follow-up optical longslit observations of a sample of 95 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies that have double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines. Based on a kinematic analysis of the longslit spectra, we confirm previous work that finds that the majority of double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines are associated with outflows. We also find that eight of the galaxies have companion galaxies with line-of-sight velocity separations <500 km s-1 and physical separations <30 kpc. Since we find evidence of AGNs in both galaxies, all eight of these systems are compelling dual AGN candidates. Galaxies with double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines occur in such galaxy mergers at least twice as often as typical active galaxies. Finally, we conclude that at least 3% of SDSS galaxies with double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines are found in galaxy mergers where both galaxies are resolved in SDSS imaging.