Interdisciplinary Studies in Operations Management: Applications in Healthcare and Marketing

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first is at the interface of Operations Management and Marketing. The question being addressed is whether it is beneficial for manufacturers to introduce new products via exclusive partnerships with retailers. To answer this question we use a game theoretic approach. We develop Stackelberg games in which the manufacturer acts as the leader by setting the wholesale price and the retailer follows by setting the retail price. Assuming an uncertain market size, we compare exclusive and non-exclusive product launches and determine conditions under which an exclusive arrangement is preferable. Additionally, we examine whether wholesale price postponement can be beneficial in this setting.;The last two are at the interface of Operations Management with Healthcare. The second chapter is motivated by legislative discussions in the European Union about providing patients with the freedom to choose the country they receive treatment. We use a queueing framework to analyze a game-theoretic model that captures the interactions among the patients, the providers and the healthcare funders. We examine the impact of such "free choice" on the healthcare systems of different countries in equilibrium. Under the assumption that each patient always prefers to receive care at home when the waiting time is below her individual tolerance level, we show that, in the long run, cross-border patient movement can increase patient welfare due to increased access to care. However, it has a mixed effect on waiting times and reimbursement rates and the additional costs of increased access to care affect the participating countries disproportionately.;The third chapter examines empirically the role of hospital processes in linking a hospital's structural characteristics with its outcomes. Using data from a sample of US hospitals on the treatment of heart attack and heart failure, we examine first how a hospital's scale and focus impact its ability to adhere to evidence-based medical guidelines. We find that higher scale at the condition level and higher focus at the cardiac department level are associated with higher process quality. We examine next if better treatment processes can also be more resource-efficient. We find that higher process quality is associated with reduced length of stay; a proxy for the cost of care. Our analysis provides some justification on the use of intermediate process measures for the design of pay-for-performance incentive programs.