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Harvest Hope Food Bank (HHFB), based in South Carolina, serves primarily donated food to people in need in 20 counties across the state. It distributed 28 million pounds of food and fed over two million individuals in fiscal year 2014-2015. However, this constituted only 40 percent of the annual meal gap of about 70 million pounds in its service area. One of HHFB's major strategic goals is to efficiently utilize its operating budget and its human and technical resources to increase food and dollar donations, which it raises through events corresponding to various promotional initiatives. We worked with HHFB management and staff to develop resource-capacity bills (i.e., the consumption of each resource per event), and calculated the expected food and (or) dollar donation yield per event. We then developed an integer programming optimization model to determine the optimal number of events of each initiative per year with the objective of maximizing the total annual meals yield (i.e., the number of meals that could be served using the food and dollar donations), subject to resource constraints and the allowable number of events of each initiative as advised by HHFB management. With our recommended optimal strategy, HHFB can provide 1.72 million additional meals per year (an increase of 41 percent) from these promotional events within the existing resource limits, which can help bridge the meal gap in its service area. HHFB has embedded the optimization model in its strategic planning of promotional events, and the allocation of resources to support these initiatives, to ensure that it can meet its 5- and 10-year meal-coverage targets. Additionally, HHFB is disseminating the value of this integrated framework to its peer food banks within the national Feeding America consortium. History: This paper was refereed. Keywords: food bank operations * nonprofit organizations * resource allocation * integer programming, Food banks are a vital link between food waste and hunger, and they serve as an interconnected lifeline to the hungry (Global FoodBanking Network 2017). They collect excess food from [...]

An important challenge faced by hotels is how to set their premium room price differential over their standard rooms and how to manage the upsell process. Standby upgrades, where the customer is only charged if the upgrade is available at the time of arrival, is one technique that has become increasingly popular in practice for monetizing the premium room inventory that may otherwise go unused. We develop a model of premium room and standby upgrade pricing under an uncertain market size and examine how and when standby upgrades can provide additional revenue for a hotel. When guests are myopic, we show that standby upgrades can be used as a powerful price discrimination tool, especially for hotel properties with high premium-to-standard room ratios. When guests are strategic, the benefit of standby upgrades is significantly diminished; we show that standby upgrades only increase revenue when the hotel property has a low premium-to-standard room ratio. Our findings thus provide guidance on the hotel types and environments that are most suitable for standby upgrades. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2016.0596. Keywords: revenue management * pricing * hotel industry * upgrades * strategic consumers, 1. Introduction In the hotel and airline industries, the sale of products with a probabilistic nature has become a popular way to price discriminate between customer segments and deal with [...]

Under changing market conditions for the hospitality industry, the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group (CRHG) collaborated with JDA Software Group to use operations research to drive higher revenue for its hoteliers [...]

We study a firm which serves customers that are sensitive to quoted price and leadtime, with pricing and leadtime decisions being made by the marketing and production departments, respectively. We analyze the inefficiencies created by the decentralization of the price and leadtime decisions. In the decentralized setting, the total demand generated is larger, leadtimes are longer, quoted prices are lower, and the firm's profits are lower as compared to the centralized setting. We show that coordination can be achieved using a transfer price contract with bonus payments. We also provide insights on the sensitivity of the optimal decisions with respect to market characteristics, sequence of decisions and the firm's capacity level. Keywords: Leadtime, pricing, marketing/production coordination, 1. Introduction In many firms, manufacturing is evaluated as a cost center that seeks lower costs and operational efficiency, while marketing is evaluated as a revenue center with control over [...]