| We consider three settings where each setting represents a stylized model of what many manufacturers face to make tactical or strategical decisions on resource allocation and pricing. By analyzing these mathematical models, we provide relevant managerial insights on the optimal pricing strategies in a supply chain with a direct sales outlet while we present another stream of insights on the allocation of flexible capacity and the optimal control of flexible workforce in two different settings.; Our first model applies a game-theoric approach to a supply chain where the manufacturer owns one of retailer channels. We provide structural results on the equilibrium pricing strategy and market segmentation under this equilibrium. The second model investigates the economic benefit of flexible workforce in a two-stage tandem queueing system with parallel servers and the structure of optimal scheduling policy under such a system. In this model, we completely characterize the optimality of exhaustive policy for the upstream queue as well as for the downstream queue. Lastly, we examine the benefit of flexible workforce where the skill level and qualification of workers are different. Under this setting, we completely characterize the structure of the optimal policies and present the necessary and sufficient conditions under which each policy can be optimal. |
