Elizabeth J. Durango-Cohen

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Illinois Institute of Technology

We study a “Forecast-Commitment” contract motivated by a manufacturer's desire to provide good service in the form of delivery commitments in exchange for reasonable forecasts and a purchase commitment from the customer. The customer provides a forecast for a future order and a guarantee to purchase a portion of it. In return, the supplier commits...

Recent supply-chain models that study competition among capacity-constrained producers omit the possibility of producers strategically setting wholesale prices to create uncertainty with regards to (that is, to obfuscate) their production capacities. To shed some light on this possibility, we study strategic obfuscation in a supply-chain model comp...

Funding pressures have forced many not-for-profit organizations to reduce their reliance on mass-marketing efforts, e.g., pledge drives, and increase the volume and sophistication of their direct marketing activities. The efficiency of direct marketing, however, is linked to an organization’s ability to target population segments effectively, which...

We present a Compound Poisson Mixture Regression model of the joint distribution of transaction frequency and monetary value, and apply it to study alumni donations at a university in the USA. The model captures covariate effects, recognizing that both response variables emanate from one statistical unit — a donor. Heterogeneity, group-level factor...

Several major grocery chains in the United States own factories that produce some of their store-brand products. Historically, these store-brand products have been the low-price, lower-quality alternatives to higher-priced national brands, but the quality and consumer acceptance of store brands have increased markedly in recent years. Although dema...

Understanding the cost effects of offering flexibility in any contractual setting is of considerable importance to suppliers. In this paper, we propose a Strategic Capacity Allocation (SCA) contract to deal with the problem of supplier-capacity allocation in a single-supplier, multiple-buyer system, when bilateral contractual agreements (between th...

Having an effective segmentation strategy is key to the viability of any organization. This is particularly true for colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations—who have seen sharp declines in private contributions, endowment income, and government grants in the past few years, and face fierce competition for donor dollars (Wall Str J...

Advances in computational power and enterprise technology, e.g., Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and data warehouses, allow many businesses to collect a wealth of information on large numbers of consumers. This includes information on past purchasing behavior, demographic characteristics, as well as how consumers interact with the o...

Funding pressures amidst the slow economic recovery from the late-2000's recession have forced universities, as well as other not-for-profit organizations, to increase the volume and sophistication of their direct marketing activities. The efficiency of direct marketing strategies is linked to an organization's ability to effectively target individ...

Several major grocery chains in the US own factories that produce some of their store-brand products. Historically, these store-brand products have been the low-price, lower-quality alternatives to higher-priced national brands, but the quality and consumer acceptance of store brands have increased markedly in recent years. While demand for store-b...

Recent supply-chain models that study competition among capacity-constrained producers omit the possibility of producers strategically setting wholesale prices to create uncertainty with regards to (that is, to obfuscate) their production capacities. To shed some light on this possibility, we study strategic obfuscation in a supply-chain model comp...

We present a clusterwise regression model to analyse alumni contributions to a private, PhD-granting university in the Midwestern USA. The model provides a framework to simultaneously segment a population, and to explain the effect of various factors on the mean annual value of donations. We contribute a different approach to marketing studies in t...

This paper presents a review of two classical business approaches to inventory control. This is followed by a discussion of an engineering approach using Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control. The main result is to show that under certain conditions all three methods generate the same policy. Using the state-space model of the LQG formulation, we...

Manufacturing firms in capital-intensive industries face inherent demand volatility for their products and the inability to change their capacity quickly. To cope with these challenges, manufacturers often enter into contracts with their customers that offer greater certainty of supply in return for more predictable orders. In this paper, we study...