不同信息透明度对分销系统及各成员的影响

考虑由一个供应商和多个零售商组成的分销系统。研究高、中、低三种不同信息透明度模式下系统的最优补货及分配策略以及相应的系统和各个零售商的期望成本。证明无论从系统的角度还是从零售商的角度,并非信息透明度越高,期望成本越低。从整个系统的角度来讲,虽然系统的期望成本总在高信息透明度模式下取得最低,但是,中低两种信息透明度模式谁取得第二低的系统期望成本取决于系统内各节点之间的距离以及零售商所面对客户需求的性质。从零售商的角度,高信息透明度并不能降低零售商的期望成本。零售商是否可以从较高的信息透明度水平中获益则取决于零售商在送货路线上所处的位置,系统内各节点之间的距离,以及零售商所面对客户需求的性质。     

Locating Facilities in the Presence of Disruptions and Incomplete Information*

In this article, we analyze a location model where facilities may be subject to disruptions. Customers do not have advance information about whether a given facility is operational or not, and thus may have to visit several facilities before finding an operational one. The objective is to locate a set of facilities to minimize the total expected cost of customer travel. We decompose the total cost into travel, reliability, and information components. This decomposition allows us to put a value on the advance information about the states of facilities and compare it to the reliability and travel cost components, which allows a decision maker to evaluate which part of the system would benefit the most from improvements. The structure of optimal solutions is analyzed, with two interesting effects identified: facility centralization and co‐location; both effects appear to be stronger than in the complete information case, where the status of each facility is known in advance.     

不同渠道权力结构和信息结构下供应链定价和销售努力决策

本文针对零售商销售努力和销售价格影响需求情况下的制造商-零售商两级供应链,研究不同渠道权力结构和信息结构下供应链的分散决策。基于博弈理论和建模方法,对几种权力结构和信息结构情景建立相应模型,通过理论与数值分析对不同博弈均衡进行比较。研究表明,随着零售商势力逐步增强制造商利润会逐步恶化;但零售商势力增强能否带来更多利润,取决于需求对价格和销售努力的敏感度、销售努力成本以及信息结构。占优一方可以通过获取对方更多信息来改善自己处境。若占优零售商不得不依赖于对制造商成本先验分布进行决策,当估计的均值大于真实成本时,适度的方差对零售商更有利。最后,讨论了销售努力成本分担的合作机制,针对非合作博弈给出了帕累托改进的合约区间和 Nash讨价还价均衡。     

LYING ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW OR ABOUT WHAT YOU DO?

We compare communication about private information to communication about actions in a one‐shot 2‐person public good game with private information. The informed player, who knows the exact return from contributing and whose contribution is unobserved, can send a message about the return or her contribution. Theoretically, messages can elicit the uninformed player's contribution, and allow the informed player to free‐ride. The exact language used is not expected to matter. Experimentally, however, we find that free‐ride depends on the language: the informed player free‐rides less—and thereby lies less frequently—when she talks about her contribution than when she talks about the return. Further experimental evidence indicates that it is the promise component in messages about the contribution that leads to less free‐ride and less lying.     

Sourcing Through Auctions and Audits

Buyers often find that obtaining complete information about suppliers is costly. In such scenarios, there is a trade‐off between the costs of obtaining information and the benefits that accrue to the owners of such information. There are also various ways in which the missing information can be obtained or inferred. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of obtaining information via the classical mechanism design approach, which relies on the information available before the contracts are designed, with that of an “audit‐based” approach, which relies on the information obtained after the fact. In our model, a single buyer (the Stackelberg leader) wishes to procure a package of products or services from various competing suppliers that possess private cost information. We allow for arbitrary cost and revenue functions and can incorporate multiple cost and revenue drivers. We show how the buyer can optimize her profit and at the same time coordinate the channel by using a contract scheme involving auctions, audits, and profit sharing. We also examine the behavior of this mechanism when the supplier can exert effort to reduce cost but the cost of effort cannot be verified. We propose several mechanisms for different precontract informational scenarios and compare their performance.     

The Value of Environmental Information without Control of Subsequent Decisions

The standard value of information approach of decision analysis assumes that the individual or agency that collects the information is also in control of the subsequent decisions based on the information. We refer to this situation as the “value of information with control (VOI‐C).” This paradigm leads to powerful results, for example, that the value of information cannot be negative and that it is zero, when the information cannot change subsequent decisions. In many real world situations, however, the agency collecting the information is different from the one that makes the decision on the basis of that information. For example, an environmental research group may contemplate to fund a study that can affect an environmental policy decision that is made by a regulatory organization. In this two‐agency formulation, the information‐acquiring agency has to decide, whether an investment in research is worthwhile, while not being in control of the subsequent decision. We refer to this situation as “value of information without control (VOI‐NC).” In this article, we present a framework for the VOI‐NC and illustrate it with an example of a specific problem of determining the value of a research program on the health effects of power‐frequency electromagnetic fields. We first compare the VOI‐C approach with the VOI‐NC approach. We show that the VOI‐NC can be negative, but that with high‐quality research (low probabilities of errors of type I and II) it is positive. We also demonstrate, both in the example and in more general mathematical terms, that the VOI‐NC for environmental studies breaks down into a sum of the VOI‐NC due to the possible reduction of environmental impacts and the VOI‐NC due to the reduction of policy costs, with each component being positive for low environmental impacts and high‐quality research. Interesting results include that the environmental and cost components of the VOI‐NC move in opposite directions as a function of the probability of environmental impacts and that VOI‐NC can be positive, even though the probability of environmental impacts is zero or one.     

Information systems outsourcing projects as a double moral hazard problem

In the past two decades many organizations have turned to other organizations to satisfy their information systems needs. Information systems outsourcing arrangements cover the spectrum from agreements involving the delivery of all information services to those providing specific services such as systems development, communications management, desktop computing provision and maintenance, and so on.In this paper we model information systems outsourcing arrangements as a non-cooperative game with two players: a company and an outsourcing vendor. The game between the two players has an inherent double moral hazard problem as the success of the information system outsourcing project depends on the actions of both players, which are costly for them and are not directly contractible. Both parties make their decisions taking into account the effects that these decisions have on the other player's actions. In our analysis, we compare the solution obtained without a moral hazard problem (the first-best solution) to the one obtained under a double moral hazard setting (the second-best solution). We demonstrate some results based on the assumption that increases in the productivity of the vendor lead to increases in the productivity of the company. Further we establish that outsourcing contracts should provide no separate payment for failure to the outsourcing vendor although effectively many of them do. We also provide a sharing rule for providing appropriate incentives for the vendor and examine the dynamics associated with this sharing rule. Finally, we further provide for the characterization of response functions and the ensuing Nash solution including the optimal outsourcing fee. This allows for the nuanced consideration of the degree of interaction between the effort of one party and the productivity of the effort of the other party. This particular interaction has not been explored formally in the extant research literature.     

B股向境内居民开放对市场信息不对称的影响——买卖价差分解方法

投资者之间的信息不对称严重影响了市场的有效性.运用买卖价差分解技术,把价差分解成流动性价差和信息不对称价差,比较了它们在B股开放前后的差异,研究了B股向境内居民开放这一事件对市场信息不对称的影响.结论表明,境内居民参与交易虽然增加了股票流动性,但并没有改善市场交易者之间的信息不对称环境.     

Push or Pull? Auctioning Supply Contracts

Consider a buyer, facing uncertain demand, who sources from multiple suppliers via online procurement auctions (open descending price‐only auctions). The suppliers have heterogeneous production costs, which are private information, and the winning supplier has to invest in production capacity before the demand uncertainty is resolved. The buyer chooses to offer a push or pull contract, for which the single price and winning supplier are determined via the auction. We show that, with a pull contract, the buyer does not necessarily benefit from a larger number of suppliers participating in the auction, due to the negative effect of supplier competition on the incentive of supplier capacity investment. We thus propose an enhanced pull mechanism that mitigates this effect with a floor price. We then analyze and compare the outcomes of auctions for push and (enhanced) pull contracts, establishing when one form is preferred over the other based on the buyer's profits. We also compare our simple, price‐only push and pull contract auctions to the optimal mechanisms, benchmarking the performance of the simple mechanisms as well as establishing the relative importance of auction design and contract design in procurement auctions.     

Managing Perishables with Time and Temperature History

We address the use and value of time and temperature information to manage perishables in the context of a retailer that sells a random lifetime product subject to stochastic demand and lost sales. The product's lifetime is largely determined by the temperature history and the flow time through the supply chain. We compare the case in which information on flow time and temperature history is available and used for inventory management to a base case in which such information is not available. We formulate the two cases as Markov Decision Processes and evaluate the value of information through an extensive simulation using representative, real world supply chain parameters.     

An experimental study of centralized information in a financial organization

An experiment involving a simulated financial lending organization was used to compare subjects' decisions regarding the degree to which the organization should be informationally centralized, with that of an optimal decision rule based on a normative model. Typically, subjects overdecentralized the information structure to process small loans, and overcentralized the information structure to process large loans. Both the theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

A Supply Chain with a Service Requirement for Each Market Signal

We study a single‐period two‐stage service‐constrained supply chain with an information update. The buyer has two procurement opportunities with the second one after observing a market signal, which updates the demand forecast. He also commits to a service level after observing the market signal. We derive his optimal ordering decisions and show that the critical market signal, the optimal first‐stage order quantity, and the optimal expected profit are monotone with respect to the target service level. We also discuss the impact of the forecast quality on the optimal decisions. We show that the optimal first‐stage order quantity may not be monotone with respect to information accuracy, as is in the case without the service constraint. In addition, we extend our analysis to the situation when an order cancellation is allowed upon the observation of the market signal. We also compare the results obtained for the problems with and without an order cancelation. Finally, we discuss the supply chain coordination issue and find that a buyback contract can also coordinate the supply chain in the presence of the service constraint.     

销售时信息披露的公平原则与互利原则

本文通过对销售商向消费者披露产品的信息的责任和义务的分析,比较了信息披露道德的公平原则和互利原则.指出了信息披露的伦理要求,应根据各种具体问题的不同适当地在公平原则和互利原则之间定位.     

Relationships among the academic business disciplines: a multi-method citation analysis

A great number of papers have been published that compare the quality or impact of academic journals. This article seeks to broaden the debate on journal evaluation by showing how top journals in various academic business disciplines, as defined by the Financial Times list of top research outlets, relate to one other. Using large-scale sociometric analyses on about 140,000 citations we found that the integration of the citation network has increased over time. Moreover, the information flow from Finance and Economics to Management has become stronger and, within Management, a polarization between information generators and users has taken place. We also found that most business academics published in distinct and mostly non-overlapping disciplines. The only exceptions were Finance and Economics as well as Strategic Management and OB/HR. Surprisingly, we also found that the general business journals, which could be assumed to be cited by most other journals across the management disciplines, are not central to the entire field. For instance, they are not complementary at all to Finance and Economics. Instead, Operations Research (OR) and Management Information Systems journals occupy the central space on the perceptual map. This indicates that these disciplines (and OR in particular) are complementary with Management and with Finance and Economics.     

Dynamic Financial Constraints: Distinguishing Mechanism Design From Exogenously Incomplete Regimes

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop computational methods based on mechanism design, linear programming, and maximum likelihood to estimate, compare, and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial/information constraints. Our methods can use both cross‐sectional and panel data and allow for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate the models using data on Thai households running small businesses from two separate samples. We find that in the rural sample, the exogenously incomplete saving only and borrowing regimes provide the best fit using data on consumption, business assets, investment, and income. Family and other networks help consumption smoothing there, as in a moral hazard constrained regime. In contrast, in urban areas, we find mechanism design financial/information regimes that are decidedly less constrained, with the moral hazard model fitting best combined business and consumption data. We perform numerous robustness checks in both the Thai data and in Monte Carlo simulations and compare our maximum likelihood criterion with results from other metrics and data not used in the estimation. A prototypical counterfactual policy evaluation exercise using the estimation results is also featured.     

Storing Fresh Produce for Fast Retrieval in an Automated Compact Cross‐Dock System

We study temporary storage of fresh produce in a cross‐dock center. In order to minimize cooling cost, compact storage systems are used. A major disadvantage of these systems is that additional retrieval time is needed, caused by necessary reshuffles due to the improper storage sequence of unit loads. In practice therefore, a dedicated storage policy is used in which every storage lane in the system accommodates only one product. However, this policy does not use the planned arrival time information of the outbound trucks. To exploit this information, this study proposes a mathematical model for a shared storage policy that minimizes total retrieval time. The policy allows different products to share the same lane. In order to solve real‐sized problems, an effective and efficient heuristic is proposed, based on a greedy construction and an improvement part, which provides near optimal solutions. The gaps between the results of the heuristic and the lower bound are mostly less than 1%. The resulting shared storage policy is generally robust against disturbances in arrival or departure times. We compare our shared storage heuristic with dedicated storage to determine which policy performs best under which circumstances. For most practical cases, shared storage appears to outperform dedicated storage, with a shorter response time and better storage lane utilization.     

信息技术对价格信息不对称的影响研究

信息技术降低了企业和客户获取信息的成本,从而对价格信息不对称产生影响。本文从客户搜索产品价格信息的角度,分别对四种市场进行分析,得出了在短期市场中,考虑IT影响时信息不对称降低、客户获得较低价格的结论;长期市场中,考虑IT影响时,信息不对称消失、市场演变为完全竞争市场的结论。最后,给出企业制定价格策略的建议。     

Choosing Choices: Agenda Selection With Uncertain Issues

We study selection rules: voting procedures used by committees to choose whether to place an issue on their agenda. At the selection stage of the model, committee members are uncertain about their final preferences. They only have some private information about these preferences. We show that voters become more conservative when the selection rule itself becomes more conservative. The decision rule has the opposite effect. We compare these voting procedures to the designation of an agenda setter among the committee and to a utilitarian social planner with all the ex interim private information.     

Social Security Wealth and Retirement Decisions in Italy

Abstract. This paper uses administrative data to study the retirement decisions of Italian private‐sector non‐agricultural employees during the period 1977–97. Our analysis tries to assess the importance of the financial incentives built into the social security system. The basic idea is very simple: at any given age, and based on the available information, workers compare the expected present value of two alternatives: retiring today or working one more year, and then choose the best one. A key role in this kind of comparisons is played by social security wealth, whose level and changes reflect the expectations about the profile of future earnings and the institutional features of the social security system. The various incentive measures that we consider differ in the precise weight given to the social security wealth that workers accrue as they continue to work. Our model does not provide a structural representation of the retirement process. A worker's decision is modeled here following a ‘quasi reduced‐form’ approach, with the incentive measures entering as predictors of the worker's choice in addition to standard variables. The estimated models are then used to predict retirement probabilities under alternative policies that change social security wealth and derived incentive measures.     

A SIMULATION OF THE EFFECTS OF ALTERNATIVE RULE SYSTEMS FOR JAI ALAI*

The inequities of the present system of rules in jai alai are documented on the basis of empirical information and theoretical results from a Monte Carlo simulation model. Some suggestions are made for changing the rules in order to make the game more equitable for both players and bettors. The simulation model is used to compare the effectiveness of the suggested rules with that of the present rules.