This paper investigates the effects of reward redemption hurdles in customer reward programs. Our research context is ``buy X, get one free'' (BXGO) reward programs, which incorporate two common redemption hurdles: a redemption threshold (X purchases are required for a free product) and an expiry

The United States educational policy requires that K-12 students participate in annual standardized tests. As a result, school districts that have traditionally utilized ongoing “formative" assessments of student progress, are increasingly relying on additional, costly “interim"

Telemedicine—remote provision of clinical services through the use of digital technologies—has the potential of significantly improving access to healthcare in rural areas across several low- and middle-income countries. However, evidence regarding the impact of this new channel of healthcare

Interest in cryptocurrencies – one may accurately say, fascination with them – and the decentralized ledger structure supporting them known as the blockchain has accelerated at an astonishing pace in the last year, indeed in just the last six months. Furthermore, the new fundraising mechanism, the

The promised benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) are predicated on the notion that better decisions will be enabled through a multitude of autonomous sensors (often deployed by different companies) providing real-time knowledge of the state of things. This knowledge will be imperfect, however,

Operational decision making in service systems often depends largely on the characterization of the random fluctuations involved. Exogenous arrivals represent a primary source of uncertainty and their stochastic behavior needs to be modeled carefully. In this talk, we will first argue that the

We derive a generalized likelihood ratio method to estimate any distribution sensitivity in a unified form. Then, the distribution sensitivities are used to in a gradient-based simulated maximum likelihood estimation (GSMLE) to estimate unknown parameters in a stochastic model without assuming that

News arrive randomly and the resulting sentiment, after quantification, behaves like a stochastic process. We propose a sentiment-driven stochastic volatility model to characterize the evolution of sentiment and its interplay with price and volatility process. Specifically, we propose a

Assortment rotation -- the retailing practice of changing the assortment of products offered to customers -- has recently been used as a competitive advantage for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. We focus on product categories where consumers typically purchase multiple products during a

A prevalent yet little understood phenomenon of customer reward programs is the use of finite reward expiration term. We develop a theoretical framework to investigate the economic rationale behind this phenomenon, and the tradeoff between short and long expiration terms. In our model, a