This paper studies the inventory management problem of dual channels operated by one vendor. Demands of dual channels are inventory-level-dependent.We propose a multi-period stochastic dynamic programming model which shows that under mild conditions, the myopic inventory policy is optimal for the infinite horizon problem. To investigate the importance of capturing demand dependency on inventory levels, we consider a heuristic where the vendor ignores demand dependency on inventory levels, and compare the optimal inventory levels with those recommended by the heuristic. Through numerical examples, we show that the vendor may order less for dual channels than those recommended by the heuristic, and the difference between the inventory levels in the two cases can be so large that the demand dependency on inventory levels cannot be neglected. In the end, we numerically examine the impact of different ways to treat unmet demand and obtain some managerial insights.

This paper studies the eect of risk-aversion in the competitive newsvendor game. Multiple newsvendors with risk-averse preferences face a random demand and the demand is allocated proportionally to their inventory levels. Each newsvendor aims to maximize his expected utility instead of his expected prot. Assuming a general form of risk-averse utility function, we prove that there exists a pure Nash equilibrium in this game, and it is also unique under certain conditions. We nd that the order quantity of each newsvendor is decreasing in the degree of risk-aversion and increasing in the initial wealth. Newsvendors with moderate preferences of risk-aversion make more prots compared with the risk-neutral situation. We also discuss the joint eect of risk-aversion and competition. If the eect of risk-aversion is strong enough to dominate the eect of competition, the total inventory level under competition will be lower than that under centralized decision-making.

This paper studies the capacity allocation game between duopolistic airlines which could offer callable products. Previous literature has shown that callable products provide a riskless source of additional rev- enue for a monopolistic airline. We examine the impact of the introduction of callable products on the revenues and the booking limits of duopolistic airlines. The analytical results demonstrate that, when there is no spill of low-fare customers, offering callable products is a dominant strategy of both airlines and provides Pareto gains to both airlines. When customers of both fare classes spill, offering callable products is no longer a dominant strategy and may harm the revenues of the airlines. Numerical ex- amples demonstrate that whether the two airlines offer callable products and whether offering callable products is beneficial to the two airlines mainly depends on their loads and capacities. Specifically, when the difference between the loads of the airlines is large, the loads of the airlines play the most important role. When the difference between the loads of the airlines is small, the capacities of the airlines play the most important role. Moreover, numerical examples show that the booking limits of the two airlines in the case with callable products are always higher than those in the case without callable products.

In Nash bargaining problem, due to fairness concerns of players, instead of maximizing the sum of utilities of all players, an implementable solution should satisfy some axioms or characterizations. Such a solution can result in the so-called price of fairness, because of the reduction in the sum of utilities of all players. An important issue is to quantify the system efficiency loss under axiomatic solutions through the price of fairness. Based on Perles–Maschler solution of two-player Nash bargaining problem, this paper deals with the extended Perles–Maschler solution of multi-player Nash bargaining problem.We give lower bounds of threemeasures of the system efficiency for this solution, and show that the lower bounds are asymptotically tight.

Due to vast sequence divergence among different viral groups, sequence alignment is not directly applicable to genome-wide comparative analysis of viruses. More and more attention has been paid to alignment-free methods for whole genome comparison and phylogenetic tree reconstruction. Among alignment-free methods, the recently proposed ‘‘Natural Vector (NV) representation” has successfully been used to study the phylogeny of multi-segmented viruses based on a 12-dimensional genome space derived from the nucleotide sequence structure. But the preference of proteomes over genomes for the determination of viral phylogeny was not deeply investigated. As the translated products of genes, proteins directly form the shape of viral structure and are vital for all metabolic pathways. In this study, using the NV representation of a protein sequence along with the Hausdorff distance suitable to compare point sets, we construct a 60-dimensional protein space to analyze the evolutionary relationships of 4021 viruses by whole-proteomes in the current NCBI Reference Sequence Database (RefSeq). We also take advantage of the previously developed natural graphical representation to recover viral phylogeny. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and accurate for classifying viruses. The accuracy rates of our predictions such as for Baltimore II viruses are as high as 95.9% for family labels, 95.7% for subfamily labels and 96.5% for genus labels. Finally, we discover that proteomes lead to better viral classification when reliable protein sequences are abundant. In other cases, the accuracy rates using proteomes are still comparable to that of genomes.