Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues arising from five types of online platforms (resource sharing, matching, crowdsourcing, review, and crowdfunding) and presents some research opportunities for operations management scholars to explore.

A lthough influenza vaccine shortage is often attributed to low supply, it has been observed that even with abundant supply, a major shortage can still occur because of late delivery. In this paper, motivated by the influenza vaccine industry, we study a supply chain contracting problem in the presence of uncertainties surrounding design, delivery, and demand of the influenza vaccine. In this supply chain, a manufacturer has insufficient incentive to initiate at-risk early production prior to the design freeze because it is a retailer who reaps the most benefits from selling more vaccines delivered on time. Anticipating that late delivery will lead to potential loss in demand, the retailer tends to reduce the order size, which further discourages the manufacturer from making an effort to improve its delivery performance. To break this negative feedback loop, a supply contract needs to achieve two objectives: incentivize at-risk early production and eliminate double marginalization. We find that two commonly observed supply contracts in practice, the delivery-time-dependent quantity flexibility (D-QF) contract and the late-rebate (LR) contract, may fail to coordinate the supply chain because of the tension between these two objectives. To resolve such a tension, we construct a buyback-and-late-rebate (BLR) contract and show that a properly designed BLR contract can not only coordinate the supply chain but also can provide full flexibility of profit division between members of the supply chain. Numerical experiments further demonstrate that the BLR contract significantly improves supply chain efficiency compared to the contracts used in the industry.

Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues arising from five types of online platforms (resource sharing, matching, crowdsourcing, review, and crowdfunding) and presents some research opportunities for operations management scholars to explore.

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), caused by SARS-CoV-2, has rapidly spread to most of countries in the world, threatening the health and lives of many people. Unfortunately, information regarding the immunological characteristics in COVID-19 patients remains limited. Here we collected the blood samples from 18 healthy donors (HD) and 38 COVID-19 patients to analyze changes in the adaptive immune cell populations and phenotypes. In comparison to HD, the lymphocyte percentage was slightly decreased, the percentages of CD4 and CD8 T cells in lymphocytes are similar, whereas B cell percentage increased in COVID-19 patients. T cells, especially CD8 T cells, showed an enhanced expression of late activation marker CD25 and exhaustion marker PD-1. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2 induced an increased percentage of T follicular helpher (Tfh)- and germinal center B-like (GCB-like) cells in the blood. However, the parameters in COVD-19 patients remained unchanged across various age groups. Therefore, we demonstrated that the T and B cells can be activated normally and exhibit functional features. These data provide a clue that the adaptive immunity in most people could be primed to induce a significant immune response against SARS-CoV-2 infection upon receiving standard medical care.

A new generation of healthcare operations management (HOM) scholars is studying timely healthcare topics (e.g., organization design, design of delivery, and organ transplantation) using contemporary methodological tools (e.g., econometrics, information economics, and queuing games). A distinguishing feature of this stream of work is that it explicitly incorporates behavior, incentive, and policy considerations arising from the entanglements across multiple entities that make up the complex healthcare ecosystem. This focus is a departure from an earlier generation of research that primarily centered on optimizing given operations of a single entity. This paper provides an introduction to this burgeoning field and maps out research opportunities. We start with identifying key entities of healthcare delivery, financing, innovation, and policymaking, illustrating them on a healthcare ecosystem map (HEM). Next, we explore the HOM literature examining the interactions among various entities in the HEM. We then develop a taxonomy for the recent HOM literature (published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Management Science, and OperationsResearch between 2013 and 2017), provide a tool-thrust graph mapping methodological tools with research thrusts, and situate the HOM literature in context by connecting it with perspectives from medical journals and mass media. We close with a reference to technological innovations that have the potential to transform the healthcare ecosystem in future decades.Key words : Healthcare operations management; healthcare ecosystem; behavior, incentive and policy issues in healthcare.

W e study a scenario in which a firm designs the compensation contract for a salesperson who exerts unobservable effort to increase the level of uncertain demand and, jointly, the firm also decides the inventory level to be stocked. We use a newsvendor-type model in which actual sales depend on the realized demand but are limited by the inventory available, and unfulfilled demand cannot be observed. In this setup, under the optimal contract, the agent is paid a bonus for meeting a sales quota. Our key result is that it may be optimal for the firm to stock more than the first-best inventory level, because this enables the firm to obtain a more precise indicator of the salesperson's effort. The possibility of stockouts due to limited inventory also leads to several counterintuitive results, including the following: (i) relative to when stockouts are not considered, it may be optimal for the firm to pay a higher bonus even though limited inventory constrains sales; (ii) as inventory becomes more expensive, thereby forcing the firm to lower its inventory, the firm may nevertheless pay the agent a higher bonus; and (iii) if there is a lower probability that the agent's effort exertion leads to high demand, rather than lowering inventory due to the lower sales potential, the firm may increase inventory.

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In this paper, we propose and analyze a distributed negotiation strategy for a multi-agent, multi-attribute negotiation in which the agents have no information about the utility functions of other agents. We analytically prove that, if the zone of agreement is nonempty and the agents concede up to their reservation utilities, agents generating offers using our offer-generation strategy, namely the sequential projection strategy, will converge to an agreement acceptable to all the agents; the convergence property does not depend on the specific concession strategy. In considering agents’ incentive to concede during the negotiation, we propose and analyze a reactive concession strategy. Through computational experiments, we demonstrate that our distributed negotiation strategy yields performance sufficiently close to the Nash bargaining solution and that our algorithms are robust to potential deviation strategies. Methodologically, our paper advances the state of the art of alternating projection algorithms, in that we establish the convergence for the case of multiple, moving sets (as opposed to two static sets in the current literature). Our paper introduces a new analytical foundation for a broad class of computational group decision and negotiation problems.