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Most of the busiest airports outside the United States, including the major connecting hubs, are classified as Level 3. At these airports, airlines need to be assigned slots by a schedule coordinator to schedule flights. Slot allocation is driven by a set of rules and priorities specified in the Worldwide Slot Guidelines (WSG) published by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The process and rules for slot allocation at Level 3 airports carry enormous economic and regulatory implications for the global air transport sector. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing quest for improvements to the process that can be realistically implemented in practice. For that purpose, we have developed an optimization model, fully compliant with the WSG, for allocating airport slots to airlines and applied it at a few airports of varying sizes in Portugal, in order to compare the slot allocations performed by the coordinators with the best possible slot allocations under a variety of objectives and constraints, as well as to assess the impacts of potential changes to the WSG. The results obtained show that some even limited changes to the WSG can, on their own, bring considerable benefits in the short term to the slot allocation process. We have also identified and summarized a number of other potential changes to the WSG, with potential to make the slot allocation process even more efficient, fair, transparent and inclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States Choosing Wisely initiative was started in 2012 by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation and focused on reducing medical resource overutilization. Since its inception in the US, similar efforts have arisen in at least a dozen countries. Strongly patient-focused, and in fact started in collaboration with the consumer magazine Consumer Reports, the effort has resulted in a collection of greater than 500 recommendations from over 80 US professional societies intended to inform both patients and doctors about medical practices whose necessity should be questioned or discussed. Targets of recommendations include practices that lack a basis in scientific evidence, practices that may be duplicative of other care already received, practices that may be harmful and practices that are simply unnecessary. While critiques have been levied against the Choosing Wisely initiative over its intent, methods and efficacy, it is clear that many of its recommendations have been adopted by large medical practices, and several positive outcomes, i.e. reductions in perceived waste, have been reported in relation to many of the recommendations, including those specifically targeting laboratory tests. The future success of Choosing Wisely will likely hinge on whether or not significantly positive and durable outcomes can be demonstrated, especially at a time where there is increasing pressure to drive down costs in medical care while concomitantly increasing quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product returns cost U.S. companies more than $100 billion annually. The cost and scale of returns management issues necessitate a deeper understanding of how to deal with product returns. We develop an analytical model that describes how consumer purchase and return decisions are affected by a seller's pricing and restocking fee policy. Taking into account the consumers' strategic behavior, we derive the seller's optimal policy as a function of consumer preferences, consumer uncertainty about product attributes, consumer hassle cost for returns, and the effectiveness of the seller's forward and reverse channel capability. We allow for two sources of consumer uncertainty and show how the seller may use its price and restocking fee as a means of targeting a segment of consumers who know their product consumption utilities. We find that even if it is possible to eliminate returns costlessly through the provision of information about the fit between consumer preferences and product characteristics, returns can nevertheless be part of an optimal product sales process. That is, we identify conditions under which it is (or is not) optimal to provide product fit information to consumers. We show that the marginal value of information to the seller is decreasing in the operational efficiency of the seller's forward and reverse logistics process as well as the level of product uncertainty. We identify the impact of multiple product options and sources of consumer uncertainty on the model's results. The analysis generates testable hypotheses about how consumer-level and seller-level parameters affect the return policies observed in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]