Research
My research focuses on helping businesses understand the consequences of uncertainty and risk as well as helping predict the efficacy of potential mitigation techniques. To that end, I create both stylized and practical mathematical models and develop novel solution methodologies and analyses. My research uses non-linear programming, linear programming, integer programming (including branch-and-price) and statistical modeling. I create useful models to make both strategic and on-line decisions, as well as behavioral models and experiments to investigate the potential effect of decision makers on the ability of firms to make optimal choices.
Publications
| [1] |
Thomas B. Cassidey, Nickolas Freeman, and Sharif Melouk.
Leveraging concurrent sourcing for risk mitigation and pricing.
Omega, 113:102723, 2022.
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We investigate a setting where a firm may choose to make and buy components used to manufacture finished goods and determine the optimal decision strategy under supply and demand risk. We assume supply risk is of an all-or-nothing manner, i.e., either the supply is totally disrupted or not. We show that the optimal strategy follows a complex threshold structure dictated by cost and capacity parameters and the component and finished product inventories. We use our results regarding the manufacturing firm’s optimal strategy to investigate the effects of concurrent sourcing on the supplier’s optimal pricing strategy. In particular, we investigate the manufacturer’s decision to share information regarding their in-house production capabilities. We find that such information sharing can benefit both parties. Specifically, an improved understanding of the manufacturer’s capabilities can result in the supplier offering lower prices to improve competitiveness. Further, we show that increasing capacity at the manufacturer may increase outsourcing in relation to insourcing. Keywords: Supply chain risk management, Concurrent sourcing, Nonlinear optimization, Information sharing |
Ongoing Projects
Presents a novel branch-and-price algorithm to incorporate randomly occurring service request times of customers in a multiple service agent routing problem.
Develops a probabilistic characterization of capacitated and multi-variate sourcing decisions, using a discrete choice model. Motivates and examines a laboratory experiment to measure human subject performance against theoretical performance in a concurrent sourcing task.
Concurrent sourcing under stochastic lead time risk.[5] Thomas B. Cassidey, Emily Griffin, Burcu Keskin On-line supplier selection of a drop-shipping retailer. Develops online algorithms for supplier selection of an e-retailer to maximize a multi-criteria objective.