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AbstractWe study return policies in the presence of supplier competition. Consider a supply chain consisting of a retailer and competing manufacturers. The retailer has a limited ordering capacity. The manufacturers compete for the retailer's orders by offering return policies. We show that in equilibrium, the manufacturers always offer full‐credit return policies to the retailer. This result explains the inconsistency between the popular practice of full‐credit returns and the theoretical argument that full‐credit return policies are suboptimal. Compared with wholesale price contracts, return policies may cause fiercer competition between manufacturers and thus make the manufacturers worse off and the retailer better off. The manufacturers and the channel always benefit from an increase in the retailer's ordering capacity. However, the retailer's profit may decrease when its ordering capacity increases. Numerical studies reveal that when manufacturers can first commit to their contract types, wholesale price contracts can be their equilibrium choices when the retailer's ordering capacity is below a threshold; otherwise, full‐credit return policies will be their unique equilibrium choice. This partially explains the coexistence of wholesale price contracts and return policies in practice.

AbstractIn this work, we study manpower allocation with time windows and job‐teaming constraints. A set of jobs at dispersed locations requires teams of different types of workers where each job must be carried out in a preestablished time window and requires a specific length of time for completion. A job is satisfied if the required composite team can be brought together at the job's location for the required duration within the job's time window. The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers and the total traveling time. We show that construction heuristics used with simulated annealing is a good approach to solving this NP‐hard problem. In experiments, this approach is compared with solutions found using CPLEX and with lower bounds obtained from a network flow model. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.