| This dissertation consists of three essays: two of them are studies in supply chain management, and one examines a problem in project management.; The first essay, entitled, "Channel Strategies for Durable Goods", examines the problem of a monopolist who concurrently sells and leases a finitely durable good to both individual and corporate consumers. A dynamic game model captures the interactions among the different marketing channels: (a) sale of new goods to individual consumers, (b) lease of new goods to both consumers and corporations, and (c) sale of off-lease goods to consumers. Managerial implications are drawn from the study of the monopoly's optimal pricing strategy for all channels.; A project management problem of how to dynamically schedule tasks to maximize the expected present value is examined in the essay entitled "Scheduling Projects with Stochastic Activity Duration to Maximize EPV". Project activity times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. It is also assumed that the start of every activity requires an outlay of funds and that a single payment is received when the project is completed. The essay describes the algorithm for generating a Continuous-Time Markov Decision Process from a PERT network and the procedure for calculating an adaptive scheduling policy. Computational performance results demonstrate the feasibility of using the algorithm for real-life scheduling problems. We also discuss how the algorithm can be adapted to handle gamma distributed task durations as well as resource constraints.; The third essay deals with the monotonicity properties of wholesale price contracts. We examine a two-echelon supply chain where the downstream retailer orders goods from an upstream supplier at a supplier-determined price. The essay provides a coherent integrated analysis of such contracts. Extensive operations and economics literature exists on wholesale price contracts, and while some of the results discussed here are well known, others have only been established in particular settings. The analysis presented does not require uniqueness and thus extends applicability. Qualitative sensitivity analysis is performed under very general assumptions about the retailer revenue function, and sufficient conditions are established that guarantee monotone changes in contract parameters (i.e. equilibrium wholesale price, quantity ordered, supplier profit) with changes in exogenous parameters such as retail price, demand elasticity and demand distribution. Many specific cases are encompassed by the assumptions including randomness in both yield and demand. |
