On tie breaking in competitive location under binary customer behavior

Ties in customer facility choice may occur when the customer selects the facility with maximum utility to be served. In the location literature ties in maximum utility are broken by assigning a fixed proportion of the customer demand to the facilities with maximum utility which are owned by the entering firm. This tie breaking rule does not take into account the number of tied facilities of both the entering firm and its competitors. In this paper we introduce a more realistic tie breaking rule which assigns a variable proportion of customer demand to the entering firm depending on the number of tied facilities. We present a general framework in which optimal locations for the old and the new tie breaking rules can be obtained through Integer Linear Programming formulations of the corresponding location models. The optimal locations are obtained for the old tie breaking rule for different values of the fixed proportion and a comparison with the results obtained for the new tie breaking rule is drawn with data of Spanish municipalities in a variety of scenarios. Finally, some conclusions are presented.     

Existence of Equilibrium in Single and Double Private Value Auctions1

We show existence of equilibria in distributional strategies for a wide class of private value auctions, including the first general existence result for double auctions. The set of equilibria is invariant to the tie‐breaking rule. The model incorporates multiple unit demands, all standard pricing rules, reserve prices, entry costs, and stochastic demand and supply. Valuations can be correlated and asymmetrically distributed. For double auctions, we show further that at least one equilibrium involves a positive volume of trade. The existence proof establishes new connections among existence techniques for discontinuous Bayesian games.     

Single Crossing Properties and the Existence of Pure Strategy Equilibria in Games of Incomplete Information

This paper analyzes a class of games of incomplete information where each agent has private information about her own type, and the types are drawn from an atomless joint probability distribution. The main result establishes existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE) under a condition we call the single crossing condition (SCC), roughly described as follows: whenever each opponent uses a nondecreasing strategy (in the sense that higher types choose higher actions), a player's best response strategy is also nondecreasing. When the SCC holds, a PSNE exists in every finite‐action game. Further, for games with continuous payoffs and a continuum of actions, there exists a sequence of PSNE to finite‐action games that converges to a PSNE of the continuum‐action game. These convergence and existence results also extend to some classes of games with discontinuous payoffs, such as first‐price auctions, where bidders may be heterogeneous and reserve prices are permitted. Finally, the paper characterizes the SCC based on properties of utility functions and probability distributions over types. Applications include first‐price, multi‐unit, and all‐pay auctions; pricing games with incomplete information about costs; and noisy signaling games.     

Co‐opetition and Investment for Supply‐Chain Resilience

This paper considers the problem of disruption risk management in global supply chains. We consider a supply chain with two participants, who face interdependent losses resulting from supply chain disruptions such as terrorist strikes and natural hazards. The Harsanyi–Selten–Nash bargaining framework is used to model the supply chain participants' choice of risk mitigation investments. The bargaining approach allows a framing of both joint financing of mitigation activities before the fact and loss‐sharing net of insurance payouts after the fact. The disagreement outcome in the bargaining game is assumed to be the result of the corresponding non‐cooperative game. We describe an incentive‐compatible contract that leads to First Best investment and equal “gain” for all players, when the solution is “interior” (as it almost certainly is in practice). A supplier that has superior security practices (i.e., is inherently safer) exploits its informational advantage by extracting an “information rent” in the usual spirit of incomplete information games. We also identify a special case of this contract, which is robust to moral hazard. The role of auditing in reinforcing investment incentives is also examined.     

Competition for a Majority

We define the class of two‐player zero‐sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities, which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved. For such games, we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the game, maximin and minimax strategies for the players, and a Nash equilibrium. If all discontinuities favor one player, then a value exists and that player has a maximin strategy. A property called payoff approachability implies existence of an equilibrium, and that the resulting value is invariant: games with the same payoffs at points of continuity have the same value and ɛ‐equilibria. For voting games in which two candidates propose policies and a candidate wins election if a weighted majority of voters prefer his proposed policy, we provide tie‐breaking rules and assumptions about voters' preferences sufficient to imply payoff approachability. These assumptions are satisfied by generic preferences if the dimension of the space of policies exceeds the number of voters; or with no dimensional restriction, if the electorate is sufficiently large. Each Colonel Blotto game is a special case in which each candidate allocates a resource among several constituencies and a candidate gets votes from those allocated more than his opponent offers; in this case, for simple‐majority rule we prove existence of an equilibrium with zero probability of ties.     

Strict Uncertainty: A Criterion for Moderately Pessimistic Decision Makers*

This paper proposes a decision rule to rank actions under strict uncertainty, the available information being limited to the states of nature, the set of alternative rows, and the consequence of choosing every row if a given state occurs. This rule is suitable to moderately pessimistic individuals and social groups, these agents being neither maximax nor maximin decision makers but people who assume that the best outcome from the action will not occur. For these decision makers the paper shows the existence of a consistent weight system in which one and only one weight is attached to each state of the world under plausible conditions of domination. Most of the traditional axioms are satisfied by the proposed ranking approach. In the frame of disappointment (measured by ranges of column dispersion), the meaning of some controversial postulates used in the literature is explained. The proposed criterion is a departure from Laplace's (1825) rule and from the remaining standard criteria. Only in the special case of equal column dispersion do both Laplace's rule and the proposed weights lead to the same solution.     

Uncertainty and Risk in Financial Markets

This paper considers a general equilibrium model in which the distinction between uncertainty and risk is formalized by assuming agents have incomplete preferences over state‐contingent consumption bundles, as in Bewley (1986). Without completeness, individual decision making depends on a set of probability distributions over the state space. A bundle is preferred to another if and only if it has larger expected utility for all probabilities in this set. When preferences are complete this set is a singleton, and the model reduces to standard expected utility. In this setting, we characterize Pareto optima and equilibria, and show that the presence of uncertainty generates robust indeterminacies in equilibrium prices and allocations for any specification of initial endowments. We derive comparative statics results linking the degree of uncertainty with changes in equilibria. Despite the presence of robust indeterminacies, we show that equilibrium prices and allocations vary continuously with underlying fundamentals. Equilibria in a standard risk economy are thus robust to adding small degrees of uncertainty. Finally, we give conditions under which some assets are not traded due to uncertainty aversion.     

基于区间灰作用量的GM(1,1)均值差分模型解的非唯一性研究

GM(1,1)是结构信息不完全的灰色预测模型，但当前其模拟及预测结果的实数形式不满足灰色理论解的非唯一性原理。文章从GM(1,1)网络模型出发，分析了灰作用量的背景与内涵，还原了影响因素不确定条件下灰作用量的区间灰数形式，构建了具有非唯一解的新型GM(1,1)均值差分模型。新模型具有更加完善的体系结构，同时能实现对传统 GM(1,1)均值差分模型的完全兼容。应用新模型对我国电力能源消费量进行建模，结果显示其建模结果的合理性优于传统 GM(1,1)模型。本研究成果对丰富灰色预测模型理论框架、完善灰色预测模型结构体系具有积极意义。     

Why Rules for Risk Communication Are Not Enough: A Problem-Solving Approach to Risk Communication

Current work on risk communication offers practitioners helpful guidelines and rules such as "speak clearly" and "speak with compassion." While important, these guidelines have limitations. They offer practitioners and scholars little aid in determining why a communication encounter failed. Also, they do not help practitioners anticipate and overcome likely difficulties in future risk situations, nor can they help locate information about how to reduce these difficulties. To overcome the limitations of rule-based approaches to risk communication, this paper describes a diagnostic or problem-solving approach. This approach maintains that instead of rules, people need bases for anticipating likely obstacles to effective communication and selecting approaches that reduce these difficulties. Research on building trust, increasing awareness, deepening comprehension, gaining agreement, and motivating action is available in fields such as communication, educational psychology, science education, marketing, counseling, negotiation, and disaster response. This paper describes a framework that assists scholars and practitioners in: (a) identifying communication goals; (b) determining principal obstacles to those goals; and (c) selecting research-based methods for overcoming or minimizing these difficulties and achieving communication objectives.     

A hybrid knowledge discovery model using decision tree and neural network for selecting dispatching rules of a semiconductor final testing factory

One of the most challenging production decisions in the semiconductor testing industry is to select the most appropriate dispatching rule which can be employed on the shop floor to achieve high manufacturing performance against a changing environment. Job dispatching in the semiconductor final testing industry is severely constrained by many resources conflicts and has to fulfil a changing performance required by customers and plant managers. In this study we have developed a hybrid knowledge discovery model, using a combination of a decision tree and a back-propagation neural network, to determine an appropriate dispatching rule using production data with noise information, and to predict its performance. We built an object-oriented simulation model to mimic shop floor activities of a semiconductor testing plant and collected system status and resultant performances of several typical dispatching rules, earliest-due-date (EDD) rule, first-come-first-served rule, and a practical dispatching heuristic taking set-up reduction into consideration. Performances such as work-in-process, set-up overhead, completion time, and tardiness are examined. Experiments have shown that the proposed decision tree found the most suitable dispatching rule given a specific performance measure and system status, and the back propagation neural network then predicted precisely the performance of the selected rule.     

货币政策规则对国际资本流动与人民币汇率的时变影响——基于TVP-SV-VAR模型的实证检验

本文从货币政策理论出发,构建以稳定国际资本流动与人民币汇率的“多目标”货币政策规则理论模型,并采用1998年1月至2019年11月的月度数据,建立开放经济下的TVP-SV-VAR模型,实证检验不同货币政策规则下货币供应冲击、利率冲击对国际资本流动与人民币汇率的时变与动态影响。结果表明：(1)不同时间阶段,货币政策冲击对国际资本流动和人民币汇率的影响存在较强的时变特征。(2)等间隔脉冲响应表明,货币政策冲击对国际资本流动的短期影响效应要高于中长期,而对人民币汇率的影响却存在一定滞后性和扩散性,且价格型规则更有利于熨平外部冲击对国际资本流动与人民币汇率的影响。(3)时点脉冲响应表明,利率冲击对国际资本流动和人民币汇率的影响弱于货币供应冲击,且利率冲击对国际资本流动的影响回到稳态均衡的速度更快。总体来看,在调节国际资本流动和稳定人民币汇率的效果上,价格型规则优于数量型规则,我国央行货币政策选择应逐步从数量型规则向价格型规则转变。     

Health‐care Nonprofits: Enhancing Governance and Public Trust

Nonprofits are a major part of the U.S. economy and they are not immune from corporate malfeasance controversies. Even Congress has expressed concern about the crisis in nonprofit governance. The nonprofit response to Congress has been a historic initiative recognizing critical challenges to nonprofit governance. In contrast to their for‐profit counterparts, nonprofits are committed to missions serving the public benefit and not to shareholder profits. Accordingly, their missions and financial resources are intrinsic to their very existence, which is built upon the public trust. That trust is rooted in fiduciary responsibility and reflected in best practices. This article traces the history of the nonprofit public trust and fiduciary standards and examines principles of Sarbanes–Oxley and other best practices as they apply to nonprofits. The authors sampled 80 health‐care nonprofit corporation web sites from eight asset classes to determine compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley and identification of fiduciary duty, ethical values, and other best practices. Among the very largest health‐care nonprofits, many comply with Sarbanes–Oxley and identify fiduciary duty, ethical values, and other best practices. However, there are substantial deficiencies in such compliance and identification among all remaining seven asset classes ranging from 99.9 million to less than 100,000. The results appear to corroborate the urgent necessity for reform articulated by the Congress and the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit governance has entered a new era where best practices must be implemented to sustain the public trust.     

An Experimental Comparison of Dispatching Rules for Field Service Support*

Field service repair management is increasing in importance as “high tech” machines such as computers, communication systems, and copy machines are becoming more popular and more widely disbursed geographically. Complicating the management of these systems are response time performance guarantees (e.g., 8-hour response time), which are a popular marketing tool for many field service businesses [21]. These response time), guarantees especially complicate the field service dispatching problem. With response time guarantees, dispatchers must consider travel times and other issues to determine which call should be assigned to an available technician. This research proposes several dispatching rules that might be applied for dispatching sequential-trip technicians in this environment and compares these rules in a simulation experiment to determine which rule is best in terms of average tardiness. The proposed composite travel time-expiration time rule was found to be the best on average tardiness performance and on all other tardiness-related measures. Given the increased importance of tardiness performance in field service organizations, the proposed composite rule appears to have promise.     

I need you,but do I love you? Strong ties and innovation in supplier–customer relations

Research on supplier–customer relationships has attracted a great deal of attention, as such relationships can positively impact firms’ knowledge acquisition and innovation. Within this stream of research, strong ties with customers have been explored with attention to their beneficial and detrimental effects, presenting a paradox to be addressed. To contribute to this debate, we suggest focusing on how tie strength is measured, and accordingly, we return to the seminal definition of tie strength by Granovetter (1973), who defines it as a combination of behavioural and affective components. We acknowledge that the two components have different characteristics and dynamics, which urges us to unbundle the two components and measure their separate impacts on knowledge acquisition and innovation. To further investigate the role of tie strength in innovation, we hypothesize and test the mediating role of knowledge acquisition. We test our hypothesis in vertical partnerships between small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) located in a high-tech cluster and their key customers. We show that the unbundled components of strong ties have a direct positive impact on the knowledge acquisition of high-tech SMEs and an indirect positive impact on innovation, with knowledge acquisition mediating the effect. Our study contributes to the debate on the paradox of tie strength in supplier–customer relations by providing and empirically testing a research approach that might complement the previous approaches and by shedding light on the important role of the affective component of tie strength in knowledge acquisition and innovation.     

Statistical Treatment Rules for Heterogeneous Populations

An important objective of empirical research on treatment response is to provide decision makers with information useful in choosing treatments. This paper studies minimax‐regret treatment choice using the sample data generated by a classical randomized experiment. Consider a utilitarian social planner who must choose among the feasible statistical treatment rules, these being functions that map the sample data and observed covariates of population members into a treatment allocation. If the planner knew the population distribution of treatment response, the optimal treatment rule would maximize mean welfare conditional on all observed covariates. The appropriate use of covariate information is a more subtle matter when only sample data on treatment response are available. I consider the class of conditional empirical success rules; that is, rules assigning persons to treatments that yield the best experimental outcomes conditional on alternative subsets of the observed covariates. I derive a closed‐form bound on the maximum regret of any such rule. Comparison of the bounds for rules that condition on smaller and larger subsets of the covariates yields sufficient sample sizes for productive use of covariate information. When the available sample size exceeds the sufficiency boundary, a planner can be certain that conditioning treatment choice on more covariates is preferable (in terms of minimax regret) to conditioning on fewer covariates.     

PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE EFFICIENCY OF BARGAINING

We show that efficient bargaining is impossible for a wide class of economic settings and property rights. These settings are characterized by (i) the existence of “adverse efficient opt‐out types”, whose participation does not change the efficient allocation and who, when they opt out, are the worst type other agents can face, and (ii) non‐existence of the “marginal core”, and its multivaluedness with a positive probability. We also examine the optimal allocation of property rights within a given class that satisfies (i), such as simple property rights, liability rules, and dual‐chooser rules. We characterize property rights that minimize the expected subsidy required to implement efficiency. With two agents, simple property rights that are optimal in this way maximize the expected surplus at the status quo allocation, but this no longer holds with more agents. We also study “second‐best” budget‐balanced bargaining under a liability rule. The optimal “second‐best” liability rule may differ from, but is often close to, the expectation of the victim's harm, which would be optimal if there were no bargaining. However, liability rules that are close to a simple property right result in a lower expected surplus than the simple property right they are near.     

Optimal Design of a Pharmaceutical Price–Volume Agreement Under Asymmetric Information About Expected Market Size

Price–volume agreements are commonly negotiated between drug manufacturers and third‐party payers for drugs. In one form a drug manufacturer pays a rebate to the payer on a portion of sales in excess of a specified threshold. We examine the optimal design of such an agreement under complete and asymmetric information about demand. We consider two types of uncertainty: information asymmetry, defined as the payer's uncertainty about mean demand; and market uncertainty, defined as both parties' uncertainty about true demand. We investigate the optimal contract design in the presence of asymmetric information. We find that an incentive compatible contract always exists; that the optimal price is decreasing in expected market size, while the rebate may be increasing or decreasing in expected market size; that the optimal contract for a manufacturer with the highest possible demand would include no rebate; and, in a special case, if the average reservation profit is non‐decreasing in expected market size, then the optimal contract includes no rebates for all manufacturers. Our analysis suggests that price–volume agreements with a rebate rate of 100% are not likely to be optimal if payers have the ability to negotiate prices as part of the agreement.     

A DECISION THEORY EXAMPLE IN FOOTBALL

In the 1967 Harvard-Cornell football game, Harvard was ahead 14–0 late in the game when Cornell scored two touchdowns. On both occasions, Cornell tried and failed on the two-point conversion attempt and lost the game 14–12. Postgame arguments were divided on the merits of Cornell's strategy. For this frequently occurring scenario in college football, we derive a maximum expected utility decision rule for the decision of kicking versus running/passing based on the relative utility of a win, a tie, or a loss and the probabilities of success with a kick as opposed to a run/pass.     

基于SC-RS的我国工业电力用户价值画像模型研究

电力用户价值画像对于提升我国供电企业的营销服务资源配置效能,提高智慧营销管理水平,从而最大化撬动供电企业的综合效益具有重要的现实意义。现有工业电力用户价值画像模型评级指标体系未能反映国家最新能源政策对我国工业企业的发展要求、无法良好应对现实电力用户用电数据的稀疏性,以及对于新用户价值等级预测的准确性存在提高空间。针对以上问题,本文集成数据挖掘技术中的谱聚类算法(Spectral Clustering, SC)与智能算法中的粗糙集理论(Rough Set, RS),构建了一种优化的数据驱动型工业电力用户价值画像模型,简称SC-RS模型。新模型构造围绕“知识萃取-知识推理-知识服务”的逻辑脉络展开,首先,在“知识萃取”部分,结合我国“碳达峰”目标与“碳中和”愿景,构建优化的我国工业电力用户价值评级指标体系,此外,采用谱聚类技术,并联合网格搜索策略,提炼用户价值等级信息情报;然后,在“知识推理”部分,应用粗糙集理论,继承已有三维规则挖掘框架,构建基于ChiMerge离散法与变异系数的行约简、基于系统依赖度的列约简、基于对象确定性因子的格约简,以及基于规则强度的规则提取方案这一拓展的四维规则挖掘模型,生成用户价值等级规则库;最后,在“知识服务”部分,一方面运用用户价值等级信息情报,构造价值决策系统,以及描摹群体用户价值画像,另一方面运用规则库,呈现可理解的价值知识,以及构造价值等级规则软分类器,实现新用户价值等级预测与个体价值画像描摹。为了展示模型的应用路径与具体步骤,采用实际工业电力用户数据,对模型开展实证研究。结果表明,SC-RS模型构建的评级指标体系紧跟我国电力行业最新发展动态,具有较强先进性;模型能够兼容稀疏性数据,对数据要求低;构造的粗糙四维规则挖掘模型可行有效,且对新用户价值等级的预测准确性高。综上,SC-RS模型能够对电力用户大数据实现价值情报挖掘与利用,是为我国电力企业智慧营销管理赋能的有力工具。     

网上逢低买入拍卖形式下的买方策略

逢低买入是一种新型的基于网络的动态定价方式。这种定价方式将不同的投标人联合起来以便获得数量折扣,它的一个特点就是商品的价格随着中标人数的增加而降低。本文采用独立私有估价假设,建立了一个不完全信息的动态博弈模型来解释在逢低买入机制下的买方的投标策略问题。通过求解发现,对于买方而言,存在一个弱占优策略:投标人投低于他估价的最大被允许投标值,这表明逢低买入拍卖是一种弱激励相容的机制。