In global retail marketplaces, returns may result in long shipping distances and loss of welfare through time-induced price deterioration. We propose to minimize these negative impacts by exchanging returns within the marketplace’s supplier network. We show that an auction-based system where suppliers bid on the returned items reduces returns’ shipping distance by up to 88% and increases resell value on average by 5% mitigating the drawbacks of benevolent return policies of retail marketplaces.

Motivated by our interaction with a labor market, we focus of matching jobs to workers with heterogenous preferences. In each period, jobs arrive sequentially. Each worker has three parameters: her work quality, capacity, and minimum number of jobs she desires. The platform wishes to maximize the matches quality via its online matching policy. We use our model to understand limitations of simple policies and propose an optimal index-based policy. We supplement our theory with extensive numerics.

Motivated by the rapid growth of the cloud computing industry, we study an infinite-horizon, stochastic optimization problem from the viewpoint of a firm that employs cloud resources to process incoming orders (or jobs) over time. Orders and resources are heterogeneous. The firm's goal is to minimize the long-run average expected cost per period, considering reserved-capacity costs, on-demand capacity costs, and order-delay costs. We show that our proposed policy is asymptotically optimal.

This paper uses a newsvendor setting to analyze the effect of payment methods and parking prices on payment amounts, occupancy, and wait times. Empirical results show that cash or mobile app payments are less than credit card payments, and lower prices increase payments for all methods. Simulation shows that lowering prices has a greater effect on occupancy and wait times than increasing them. The study also indicates surroundings of parking spaces significantly affect performance measures.

With the emergence of on-demand platforms, it has become viable for drivers to participate in package delivery and passenger rides operations at the same time. The integration and coordination of the two services, known as co-modality, is considered a promising solution for improving the efficiency of urban logistics and mobility systems. In this work, we propose a simple zoning-based coordination policy and analyze its performance against pure delivery and ride-hailing policies.

TBD