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Managing the allocation of shelf space for new products is a problem of significant importance for retailers. The problem is particularly complex for exhibitors—the retailers in the motion picture supply chain—because they face dynamic challenges, given the short life cycles of movies, the changing level of demand over time, the scarcity of shelf space, and the complex revenue sharing contract between the exhibitor and the distributor. In the face of this complexity, the aim of current research is to provide a structure for analyzing management problems of exhibitors in the movie industry. Using a mathematical programming approach and a fast, but readily accessible algorithm, we propose a decision support model, SilverScreener, whose aim is to help exhibitors make effective and timely decisions regarding theater screens management. The major objective is to help select and schedule movies for a multiple-screens theater over a fixed planning horizon in such a way that the exhibitor's cumulative profit is maximized. By treating the multiple screens as and the movies as , we provide an analogy of the current problem to the parallel machine scheduling problem. We formulate the resulting problem as an integer program. We depart from the typical parallel machine scheduling problems by introducing the that is particularly useful for solving the current problem. An important distinction between the current problem and typical machine scheduling problems is that the present approach allows for the choice of which movies to play; typically, in machine scheduling, all jobs have to be scheduled. We provide various analyses of normative versus actual decision making, based on publicly available data. The developed model is readily implementable and appears to lead to improved profitability in different comparative cases. Through sensitivity analysis, we demonstrate that the above results are robust to variations in various parameters of the problem. The main findings and insights from the normative policy suggest the following: • Based on SilverScreener's recommendations, the exhibitor can achieve substantially higher cumulative profit. • The improvement over actual decisions in terms of profitability appears to result from a combination of better selection and scheduling of the movies. • The general structure of the exhibitor's normative decision is: . We propose a two-tier integrated application of the model to show how the model can be applied to realistic decision making. The first tier involves development of a to help the manager plan an entire season and bid for movies before the start of that season. An ex ante revenue prediction scheme is developed, based intuitively on a of the forthcoming movies with similar movies played in this theater previously. If the forthcoming season's scheduling plan can be visualized as a two-dimensional (week-by-screen) matrix, then that matrix contains only “empty cells” before the first tier. After a bid plan is developed, the exhibitor can “fill” some of those empty cells. The remaini...

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In our children's hospital, use of 10 antimicrobials increased during the study period. Inappropriate use of vancomycin and cefepime was greatest on the critical care and surgical services, largely as a result of failure to de-escalate therapy, suggesting targets for future antimicrobial stewardship interventions.

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