Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Management
First Advisor
Alizamir, Saed
Abstract
This dissertation studies a range of topics in social responsibility and the operations of public sector. The three essays presented in this dissertation are intended to provide normative recommendations to better inform public-policy decisions, through the examination of private-public sector interactions. Chapter 1 focuses on the enforcement of environmental/labor regulations and highlights the role of self-inspection by the regulated entity. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the management of the Australian blood bank. The chapters identify a causal relationship between blood age and hospital demand, and propose novel remedies to improve the blood bank's supply chain. Chapter 1, "Competing to Discover Compliance Violations: Self-Inspections and Enforcement Policies," explores a central question of policy design: how to motivate companies to police their own activities, in order to achieve cost-effective enforcement of environmental/labor standards. We develop a game-theoretical model that captures random violations of varying severity and incorporates the interactions between a regulator and a firm that unfold over time. Both the regulator and the firm perform costly inspections to discover the state of production. If noncompliance is detected by the regulator, the firm is required to pay penalties and restore compliance. To avoid a penalty, the firm performs self-inspections to preemptively detect noncompliance and restore compliance. Under equilibrium, we find that the inspection frequency chosen by the firm and the regulator can be complements or substitutes in different parameter regions. Further, our analysis sheds light on the importance of the penalty magnitude, and how it impacts the effectiveness of the enforcement policies. Lastly, we compare these results with those of a centralized enforcement model and identify the inefficiencies of enforcement policies. In Chapter 2, "An Empirical Analysis of Blood Donation Dynamics," we address an important question concerning blood management: How does the storage age of blood (blood freshness) affect hospitals' ordering decisions? Extensive literature has investigated the effect of blood age, mostly from clinical or biological perspectives, with inconclusive and mixed results. This study organically combines an empirical methodology with elements from operations management to provide a novel understanding of blood freshness and its role in blood supply chains. We establish a causal relationship between hospitals' blood demand and the age of blood issued from a blood bank, through the construction of instrumental variables. Our results suggest that issued blood freshness is (negatively) causally related to hospitals' future blood demand. That is, issuing fresher blood to hospitals helps to reduce the hospitals' future demand for blood. This chapter opens a line of research for blood \textit{freshness} management, and leads to potentially significant implications regarding inventory management of red blood cells (RBCs). Chapter 3, "Blood Inventory Management - Threshold and Flexible Donor Allocation Design," proposes several inventory management policies to improve the performance of the blood bank's supply chain. Blood inventory management faces several challenges. On the one hand, the volatility in blood inventory may result in consequential shortages and/or unintended waste. On the other hand, Chapter 2 reveals the importance of the issued blood age, and its impact on hospital demands for blood. Hence, ensuring a sustainable stream of blood, while minimizing both shortage and waste and maintaining blood freshness, requires careful design of distribution policy and donor allocations. Instead of the current policy of first-in-first-out (FIFO) demand fulfillment, we introduce and experiment with two different strategies: (i) threshold-based allocation, which is constructed as the optimal juxtaposition of FIFO and LIFO policies, and (ii) flexible donor allocation, which identifies reliable donors and uses them as a hedge against undesirable fluctuations. Our strategies find a balance among three major criteria: freshness, shortage and waste, additionally achieving demand reduction through the benefit of freshness improvement.
Recommended Citation
Shi, Yu, "Socially Responsible Operations: Essays on Public Sector Management" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1006.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1006
