Managing Demand Risk in Tactical Supply Chain Planning for a Global Consumer Electronics Company

We consider the problem of managing demand risk in tactical supply chain planning for a particular global consumer electronics company. The company follows a deterministic replenishment‐and‐planning process despite considerable demand uncertainty. As a possible way to formally address uncertainty, we provide two risk measures, “demand‐at‐risk” (DaR) and “inventory‐at‐risk” (IaR) and two linear programming models to help manage demand uncertainty. The first model is deterministic and can be used to allocate the replenishment schedule from the plants among the customers as per the existing process. The other model is stochastic and can be used to determine the “ideal” replenishment request from the plants under demand uncertainty. The gap between the output of the two models as regards requested replenishment and the values of the risk measures can be used by the company to reallocate capacity among different products and to thus manage demand/inventory risk.     

Economic Evaluation of Scale Dependent Technology Investments

We study the effect of financial risk on the economic evaluation of a project with capacity decisions. Capacity decisions have an important effect on the project̂s value through the up‐front investment, the associated operating cost, and constraints on output. However, increased scale also affects the financial risk of the project through its effect on the operating leverage of the investment. Although it has long been recognized in the finance literature that operating leverage affects project risk, this result has not been incorporated in the operations management literature when evaluating projects. We study the decision problem of a firm that must choose project scale. Future cash flow uncertainty is introduced by uncertain future market prices. The firm's capacity decision affects the firm's potential sales, its expected price for output, and its costs. We study the firm's profit maximizing scale decision using the CAPM model for risk adjustment. Our results include that project risk, as measured by the required rate of return, is related to the inverse of the expected profit per unit sold. We also show that project risk is related to the scale choice. In contrast, in traditional discounted cash flow analysis (DCF), a fixed prescribed rate is used to evaluate the project and choose its scale. When a fixed rate is used with DCF, a manager will ignore the effect of scale on risk and choose suboptimal capacity that reduces project value. S/he will also misestimate project value. Use of DCF for choosing scale is studied for two special cases. It is shown that if the manager is directed to use a prescribed discount rate that induces the optimal scale decision, then the manager will greatly undervalue the project. In contrast, if the discount rate is set to the risk of the optimally‐scaled project, the manager will undersize the project by a small amount, and slightly undervalue the project with the economic impact of the error being small. These results underline the importance of understanding the source of financial risk in projects where risk is endogenous to the project design.     

我国上市公司内部控制与风险防范

文章从分析啤酒花公司董事长失踪的原因入手,探讨了制约上市公司董事长权力的有效方法——完善上市公司的内部控制,提出从建立健全内部控制体系并对之进行监督评价和加强法制建设两个方面进行有效的防范。     

A General Formula for Valuing Defaultable Securities

Previous research has shown that under a suitable no‐jump condition, the price of a defaultable security is equal to its risk‐neutral expected discounted cash flows if a modified discount rate is introduced to account for the possibility of default. Below, we generalize this result by demonstrating that one can always value defaultable claims using expected risk‐adjusted discounting provided that the expectation is taken under a slightly modified probability measure. This new probability measure puts zero probability on paths where default occurs prior to the maturity, and is thus only absolutely continuous with respect to the risk‐neutral probability measure. After establishing the general result and discussing its relation with the existing literature, we investigate several examples for which the no‐jump condition fails. Each example illustrates the power of our general formula by providing simple analytic solutions for the prices of defaultable securities.     

Monte Carlo Sensitivity Analysis of Unknown Parameters in Hazardous Materials Transportation Risk Assessment

The US Department of Transportation was interested in the risks associated with transporting Hydrazine in tanks with and without relief devices. Hydrazine is both highly toxic and flammable, as well as corrosive. Consequently, there was a conflict as to whether a relief device should be used or not. Data were not available on the impact of relief devices on release probabilities or the impact of Hydrazine on the likelihood of fires and explosions. In this paper, a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis of the unknown parameters was used to assess the risks associated with highway transport of Hydrazine. To help determine whether or not relief devices should be used, fault trees and event trees were used to model the sequences of events that could lead to adverse consequences during transport of Hydrazine. The event probabilities in the event trees were derived as functions of the parameters whose effects were not known. The impacts of these parameters on the risk of toxic exposures, fires, and explosions were analyzed through a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis and analyzed statistically through an analysis of variance. The analysis allowed the determination of which of the unknown parameters had a significant impact on the risks. It also provided the necessary support to a critical transportation decision even though the values of several key parameters were not known.     

Critical Radionuclide/Critical Pathway Analysis for the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site

Many different radionuclides have been released to the environment from the Savannah River Site (SRS) during the facility's operational history. However, as shown by this analysis, only a small number of the released radionuclides have been significant contributors to potential doses and risks to off-site people. This article documents the radiological critical contaminant/critical pathway analysis performed for SRS. If site missions and operations remain constant over the next 30 years, only tritium oxide releases are projected to exceed a maximally exposed individual (MEI) risk of 1.0E-06 for either the airborne or liquid pathways. The critical exposure pathways associated with site airborne releases are inhalation and vegetation consumption, whereas the critical exposure pathways associated with liquid releases are drinking water and fish consumption. For the SRS-specific, nontypical exposure pathways (i.e., recreational fishing and deer and hog hunting), cesium-137 is the critical radionuclide.     

风险规避与企业的产生和发展

本文沿阿尔钦的风险规避(risk aversion)思想继续深入,认为企业的产生和发展是根源于所有参与人的风险规避动机,修正了新古典经济学的关于企业、企业家和资本家的风险中性和风险偏好假设,使理性经济人假设保持一致,并证明风险规避动机促使企业产生和发展,最后还以企业产生的历史、今天的发展和企业的存在形式作为分析验证的佐证。其中关于风险的证明在金融经济学、资产定价模型理论中具有广泛的应用。     

Asymptotic Minimax Risk for the White Noise Model on the Sphere

Estimation of an unknown function on the unit sphere of the Euclidean space is considered. The function is observed in Gaussian continuous time white noise. Uniform norm is chosen as a loss function and exact asymptotic minimax risk is derived extending the result of Korostelev (1993). The exact asymptotic minimax risk is also given for the L ₂-loss, applying the result of Pinsker (1980).     

宁波蔺草制品出口下降成因分析及对策

文章试图以蔺草制品榻榻米的终端市场(日本市场)的变化为切入点,运用供需均衡理论、弹性分析等经济学研究工具,对蔺草制品出口量下降的原因及蔺草产业链的每一环节进行深入分析,并提出了相应对策。