2 papers published in Omega win awards for excellence
December 15, 2021
Professors Georges Zaccour, Yossiri Adulyasak and Raf Jans and PhD student Narges Sereshti are among the scholars honoured with Best Paper Awards this year from Omega – The International Journal of Management Science.
Professor Zaccour received the award for the paper titled Optimal dynamic management of a charity under imperfect altruism, co-written with Bertrand Crettez and Naila Hayek, of Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II.
Narges Sereshti and Professors Adulyasak and Jans received this distinction for The value of aggregate service levels in stochastic lot sizing problems.
More about the winners
Georges Zaccour is a Full Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and holder of the Chair in Game Theory and Management. He is recognized internationally for his scientific contribution to this field, and is also a member of the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD). He received the 2021 Pierre Laurin Award for Research Excellence from the School.
Yossiri Adulyasak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management. He too is a member of GERAD, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Supply Chain Analytics.
Raf Jans is a Full Professor in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management, holds the Chair in Supply Chain Operations Planning and is responsible for the Logistics and Operations Management specialization of the PhD program. He is also a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and of GERAD.
Narges Sereshti is a PhD student in the Logistics and Operations Management specialization. Her research concerns production planning considering service levels. She is a member of GERAD and CIRRELT.
Georges Zaccour, Yossiri Adulyasak, Raf Jans and Narges Sereshti.
About the articles
Optimal dynamic management of a charity under imperfect altruism
The objective of this paper is to determine optimal policies for a charity, given that the donations it receives are a function of its reputation, which is an asset built up over time, and of the way the organization is managed. To reach this objective the authors propose a dynamic model where the charity can allocate its revenues (donations) to 3 main activities, namely program expenditures, information campaigns and administrative expenditures (wages, fringe benefits, etc.). If the administrative expenditures exceed a certain socially admissible level, the organization’s reputation suffers. On the other hand, its reputation benefits if these expenditures are lower than the social spending norm. The authors characterize the optimal policies for distributing donations among the various activities as a function of the organization’s environment (defined using a series of parameters) and discuss their implications in terms of public policy.
The value of aggregate service levels in stochastic lot sizing problems
This paper concerns inventory management for a range of products. In the planning of production decisions for a variety of products, enough units must be available for each product to guarantee a predefined service level (e.g., in terms of demand that can be met immediately without the risk of creating shortages). In the scientific literature, these service levels are typically defined for individual products. In practice, however, there are often several products in the same range (e.g., clothing items of different colours). In such cases, different service levels may apply to the aggregate range or to the individual product. Since this aspect has been overlooked in the literature to date, the authors consider an original problem in this paper. They then model it as a 2-stage stochastic programming problem. Lastly, they show that such a model can be effectively used in a receding horizon environment.