When confronted with a choice between a lettuce with a “best before” date falling in two days’ time and one in four days’ time, a supermarket customer will typically plump for the latter. This choice puts the product remaining on the shelf one step closer to a clearance sale, or even to the bin. “Waste is substantial in retailing,” note HKUST’s Qing Li and ... Read More

When confronted with a choice between a lettuce with a “best before” date falling in two days’ time and one in four days’ time, a supermarket customer will typically plump for the latter. This choice puts the product remaining on the shelf one step closer to a clearance sale, or even to the bin. “Waste is substantial in retailing,” note HKUST’s Qing Li and ... Read More

Opaque selling is a marketing strategy adopted by industries such as retailing and travel under which firms sell end-of-the-season inventory of different products as a single opaque good and customers find out the specific products they actually get only after they have made the purchase. Opaque selling entails a “double-blind” process: customers do not know ... Read More

We model a multi-phase and high-volume recruitment process as a large-scale dynamic program. The success of the process is measured by a reward, which is the total assessment score of accepted candidates minus the penalty cost of the number of accepted candidates in the end deviating from a preset hiring target. For a recruiter, two questions are important ... Read More

Many organizations recruit a large number of people in a short amount of time, a practice known as high volume recruitment. Organizations hire in volume for various reasons. For example, they are growing exponentially, they are opening new locations or offices, or to create economy of scale and synchronize with the school calendar, they have regular ... Read More

Eurowings, the German low-cost airline, offers leisure travelers a sweet deal. Fly to many of its popular European destinations for as low as 33 euros (about $38). The only catch: Eurowings decides where you end up. It works like this: Choose a starting point among Eurowings’ German or Austrian cities and select from a handful of thematic categories — ... Read More

Retail products such as food items and pharmaceuticals are perishable. For them, matching supply with uncertain demand is a challenge. Retailers sometimes run out of stock, which leads to revenue loss, and they sometimes have to throw away items that have passed their expiration dates. It was found that four main supermarkets in Hong Kong discard ... Read More