Seminars

The following speakers will visit Kellogg this Winter/Spring for the 2009-10 Kellogg Operations Seminar Series. Please click on a date for more information about a particular talk.

View past seminars

"Estimating the value of waiting list information in liver transplant decision making"
Talk by Burhaneddin Sandikci, Chicago Booth
January 27th, 2010
2:00-3:00 PM, room 561
In the United States, patients with end-stage liver disease must join a waiting list to be eligible for cadaveric liver transplantation. Due to privacy concerns, the details of the composition of this waiting list are not publicly available. This paper considers the benefits associated with creating a more transparent waiting list. We study these benefits by modeling the organ accept/reject decision faced by these patients as a Markov decision process in which the state of the process is described by patient health, quality of the offered liver, and a measure of the rank of the patient in the waiting list. We prove conditions under which there exist structured optimal solutions, such as monotone value functions and control-limit optimal policies. We define the concept of the patient’s price of privacy, namely, the number of expected life days lost due to the lack of complete waiting list information. We conduct extensive numerical studies based on clinical data, which indicate that this price of privacy is typically on the order of 5% of the optimal solution value.

"Coordinating lead-time and safety stock decisions in a two-echelon supply chain"
Talk by Robert Boute, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, visiting Kellogg School of Management
February 10th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561
We study a two-echelon (retailer-manufacturer) supply chain, modeled as a discrete time production/inventory system with random period consumer demands. The retailer’s inventory levels are reviewed periodically and managed using a base-stock policy. The manufacturer produces the retailer’s orders on a make-to-order basis and he decides on the lead time based on the retailer’s order process. The manufacturer’s production system is capacitated in the sense that there is a single server that sequentially processes single units one at a time with stochastic unit processing times. The resulting lead times determine safety stock levels at the retailer. Making use of matrix-analytic methods and Phase Type distributions, we analyze the interaction between the consumer demand process, the retailer’s replenishment decision (and corresponding safety stocks), and the manufacturer’s production lead time. We show that by including endogenous lead times in our analysis, the retailer’s order variability can be dampened without increasing his stock levels. This leads to a situation where both supply chain echelons are better off.

"Is Leasing Greener than Selling?"
Talk by Beril Toktay, GIT
February 17th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561
Based on the proposition that leasing is environmentally superior to selling, some firms have adopted a leasing strategy and others promote their existing leasing programs as environmentally superior in order to ``green'' their image. The argument is that as a leasing firm retains ownership of the off-lease units, it has an incentive to remarket the products, resulting in a lower production and disposal volume. However, some argue that leasing might be environmentally inferior due to the direct control the firm has over the off-lease products, which may prompt their premature disposal to avoid cannibalizing the demand for new products. Motivated by these issues, we adopt a life-cycle environmental impact perspective and analytically investigate if either leasing or selling can be both more profitable for a monopolist and have a lower total environmental impact. We identify conditions where each of these outcomes can occur, depending on the magnitude of the disposal cost, the differential in disposal costs faced by the firm and consumers, and the environmental impact profile of the product. These results provide insights for firms who want to promote their marketing strategy as the ``greener'' choice.

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Talk by Nicole Adler, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
April 21st, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561

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Talk by Rodney Parker, Chicago Booth
May 5th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561

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Talk by Ali Parlaturk, UNC
May 12th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561

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Talk by Srinagesh Gavirneni, Cornell
May 19th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561

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Talk by Vivek F. Farias, MIT
May 26th, 2010
12:00-1:00 PM, room 561


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