JSOM Faculty Research
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10735.1/2086
Browse
Browsing JSOM Faculty Research by Author "0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW)"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item On Member-Driven, Efficient and Fair Timeshare Exchanges(Wiley, 2018-06-07) Cesaret, Bahriye; Dawande, Milind W,; Rajapakshe, Tharanga; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); Dawande, Milind W.Vacation Timeshare is a form of ownership or "right to use" of a resort property for a specific time period (typically a week) each year. Timeshare exchange refers to the non-monetary trading of timeshare weeks among owners, so that they can interchange their vacation homes to experience new destinations. The need for member participation during the exchange process has been well-recognized for a variety of practical reasons, including the reluctance of members to accept an authoritarian solution that does not provide any information about the exchange process and their desire to experience some control over the process. Another important need is to ensure that, given the members' preferences, an exchange solution offers collectively the best-possible improvement over their currently-owned weeks, while being "fair" to all participants. We suggest two objectives to capture the efficiency and fairness of an exchange solution. For the resulting bi-criteria problem, we show that a solution that is simultaneously near-optimal on both objectives may not exist. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm in which (i) each member uses her private preference list to communicate with other members, and the members, through such communications, collectively achieve an individually rational allocation, and (ii) for any desired approximation bounds alpha and beta on, respectively, efficiency and fairness, the following property holds: if an (alpha, beta)-approximate solution exists, then the solution provided by the algorithm satisfies this approximation guarantee; otherwise, the solution is an alpha-approximation on the efficiency measure and, among all such allocations, has the best fairness measure.Item Optimal Procurement Auctions under Multistage Supplier Qualification(INFORMS) Chen, W.; Dawande, Milind W.; Janakiraman, Ganesh; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); 0000-0001-7386-4318 (Jamakiraman, G); Dawande, Milind W.; Janakiraman, GaneshWe consider a firm that solicits bids from a fixed-sized pool of yet-to-be qualified suppliers for an indivisible contract. The contract can only be awarded to a supplier who passes a multistage qualification process. For each stage of the qualification process, the buyer incurs a fixed testing cost for each supplier she chooses to test. The buyer seeks an optimal mechanism-that is, one that minimizes her total expected cost. Motivated by the buyer's urgency (or the lack of it) of time for completing the qualification process, we obtain optimal mechanisms for two testing environments: (1) simultaneous testing, where in each stage, the buyer selects a subset of those suppliers who have passed all the previous stages and tests them simultaneously; and (2) nonsimultaneous testing, where the simultaneous-testing requirement is not imposed. Under simultaneous testing, the admission policy for selecting suppliers at each stage is based on nonuniformreserve-price thresholds. Under nonsimultaneous testing, too, the admission policy is threshold based, but the selection process is sequential in nature. The relative increase in cost due to the simultaneous-testing requirement is (under a mild condition) monotonically increasing in the number of suppliers, the expected multistage testing cost, and the overall passing probability. We also study the optimal sequencing of the qualification stages and show that the buyer should schedule the stages in increasing order of the ratio of their testing cost to their failing probability. Finally, for the simpler setting of a single-stage qualification process and a single supplier, we study a two-dimensional mechanism design problem where, in addition to cost, the passing probability is also private to the supplier. Here, too, threshold-based admission remains optimal, and the buyer offers either a pooling or a separating contract. Copyright: ©2018 INFORMS.Item Shaping the Values of a Milk Cooperative: Theoretical and Practical Considerations(Wiley-Blackwell, 2019-05-22) Mu, L.; Dawande, Milind; Mookerjee, Vijay; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); Dawande, Milind; Mookerjee, VijayDairy cooperatives bestow upon farmers the virtues of controlling a large supply quantity of a relatively scarce product, that is, milk (e.g., higher bargaining power, fixed cost sharing, etc.). However, the cooperative structure also encourages individual farmers to free-ride (i.e., provide low-quality milk in the hope that other farmers provide good-quality milk). The question arises: How can the benefits of a cooperative be retained, while eliminating free-riding, especially when individual inspection costs are high? We examine this question from the perspective of a social planner, who wishes to achieve the simultaneous goals of quantity efficiency, quality efficiency, and minimal testing. The basic challenge in this quest is that of countering an endogenous value function associated with a coalition of farmers. This value function emerges from the joint interaction of three forces: (i) an individual farmer’s payment-maximizing behavior, (ii) the testing policies employed by the cooperative, and (iii) the manner in which the revenue earned by a coalition is shared among the farmers (allocation rule). A novel allocation rule—that exploits individual incentives to guide the collective behavior of the farmers and thereby the value–function endogeneity—is proposed that achieves the planner’s goals in the presence of these forces. A modification to this allocation rule is made to address the goals of practicality, e.g., the presence of low-income farmers and unintended variation in the quality of a farmer’s output. We examine our interventions in the light of sample data from actual dairy cooperatives to demonstrate the viability of our proposals. ©2019 Production and Operations Management Society