Introduction to the Special Issue on E‐Auctions for Procurement Operations

We present nine papers on e‐auctions for procurement operations. The first of the issue's three sections is a foreword highlighting current trends and future research directions. The second section is composed of three commissioned survey papers, covering auctions within e‐sourcing events, electronic markets for truckload transportation, and games and mechanism design in machine scheduling. The final section consists of five research papers on the following topics: whether auction parameters affect buyer surplus in e‐auctions for procurement, collusion in second‐price auctions under minimax regret, the effect of timing on jump bidding in ascending auctions, market‐based allocation with indivisible bids, and ranked items auctions and online advertisement.     

电子市场价格分散、信息价值与效率:多视角的分析框架

电子市场是集合买卖双方交换价格和产品信息的跨组织信息系统,已成为撮合交易的重要虚拟场所,其对有形市场的影响力日益彰显,引起理论界和实务界的密切关注.本文将电子市场价格分散、信息价值与效率问题放在同一分析框架下研究,从不同的视角审视电子市场现存文献的解释力度;指出电子市场价格分散现象是多种因素综合作用的结果,消费者的搜寻异质、买方偏好(品牌、信任与忠诚度等因素)、服务质量、市场结构特征等多变量共同决定了电子市场的价格分散度、信息价值及效率大小;最后,提出了未来电子市场的研究方向,即通过价格比较购物技术扩散模型的引入,建立集影响电子市场价格的多变量于一体的理论分析框架,探讨电子市场价格分散及与其相关联的信息价值测度和市场效率等基础理论问题.     

An Integrated Approach for Modeling Sustainability Risks in Freight Transportation Systems

Integrating sustainability into freight transportation systems (FTSs) is a complex and challenging task due to the sheer number of inherent sustainability risks. Sustainability risks disrupt the economic, social and environmental objectives of freight operations and act as impediments in the development of sustainable freight transportation systems. The area of sustainability risk management is still unexplored and immature in the operational research domain. This study addresses these research gaps and contributes in a threefold manner. First, a total of 36 potential sustainability risks related to FTSs are identified and uniquely classified into seven categories using a rigourous approach. Second, the research proposes two prominent perspectives, namely, ontological and epistemological perspectives to understand risks and develops a novel framework for managing sustainability risks in FTSs. Third, a novel approach by integrating fuzzy evidential reasoning algorithm (FERA) with expected utility theory is developed to quantitatively model and profile sustainability risk for different risk preferences, namely, risk-averse, risk-neutral, and risk-taking scenarios. The proposed FERA is a flexible and robust approach, which transforms the experts’ inputs into belief structures and aggregates them using the evidence combination rule proposed in Dempster–Shafer theory to overcome the problem of imprecise results caused by average scoring in existing models. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model. Unlike conventional perception, our study suggests that most of the high priority sustainability risks are behaviorally and socially induced rather than financially driven. The results provide significant managerial implications including a focus on skills development, and on social and behavioral dimensions while managing risks in FTSs.     

考虑信息不对称的电子市场动态契约设计

近年来,伴随着互联网技术的快速发展以及电子商务在广大消费者中的日益普及,以淘宝网、eBay等为代表的电子市场的销售规模和交易金额都实现了跳跃式的增长。但是,在买卖双方交易数量快速增加的同时,提供交易平台的电子市场所有者始终缺乏有效的收费模式来实现自身的利润最大化,这一窘境已经得到产业界和学术界越来越多的关注。当前,各类电子市场大多采用的收费模式是以每个卖家前一期的销售历史来预测该卖家下一期的销售数量,并以此作为基准来动态更新电子市场对于该卖家下一期的收费标准。这种收费方法暗含的假设是相邻周期间产品销量为强正相关,但忽略了产品销量因季节性、流行性、替代产品威胁等各类因素影响而导致的更加复杂的中长期变化趋势。针对这一问题,本文为电子市场所有者提供了一类新的个性化动态契约机制。这种契约机制假设相邻周期的产品销量服从联合正态分布,在每个周期开始前,卖家能够充分考虑到各类因素的影响,从而对于下一期销量做出比电子市场所有者更准确的条件预期。但是,卖家对于相邻周期销量间的相关系数的观测属于私有信息,为了诱导卖家披露这一私有信息,电子市场所有者在每周期开始前需要根据该卖家上一周期的实际销售数量向卖家提供一系列契约（a menu of contracts）供卖家选择。本文构建了这种个性化动态契约的参数优化问题。求解结果揭示了一个简单的决策准则,即最优的契约参数可以表示为关于上述相关系数的failure rate的函数。通过一组数值试验,本文将这种契约与其他三类契约进行了对比,验证了这种契约能够充分地利用卖家的私有信息来提升电子市场所有者的利润。本文所述的契约机制在互联网环境下具有较强的可操作性,因此可以为电子市场所有者提供直接的管理参考和决策依据。     

When Gray is Good: Gray Markets and Market‐Creating Investments

Gray markets arise when an intermediary buys a product in a lower‐priced, often emerging market and resells it to compete with the product's original manufacturer in a higher priced, more developed market. Evidence suggests that gray markets make the original manufacturer worse off globally by eroding profit margins in developed markets. Thus, it is interesting that many firms do not implement control systems to curb gray market activity. Our analysis suggests that one possible explanation lies at the intersection of two economic phenomena: firms investing to build emerging market demand, and investments conferring positive externalities (spillovers) on a rival's demand. We find that gray markets amplify the incentives to invest in emerging markets, because investments increase both emerging market consumption and the gray market's cost base. Moreover, when market‐creating investments confer positive spillovers, each firm builds its own market more efficiently. Thus, firms can be better off with gray markets when investments confer spillovers, provided the spillover effect is sufficiently large. These results provide a perspective on why firms might not implement control systems to prevent gray market distribution in sectors where investment spillovers are common (e.g., the technology sector) and, more broadly, why gray markets persist in the economy.     

电子公共大脑本体系统设计

本体系统方法是目前在知识管理、人工智能等领域得到广泛应用的新型系统方法。本文通过对支持群体交互知识管理的电子公共大脑本体系统设计的案例,对本体系统方法的概念、构成和应用方法作了一个示例性介绍。     

The Changing Nature of Internal Labor Markets

Research on Internal Labor Markets (ILMs) has had enormous influence on social sciences since the seminal work by Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore, thirty years ago.This article discusses the past and current contribution of the ILM concept to the development of labor economics, organization theory and human resource management and argues that research on ILMs remains important, despite the changes occurred in the economy. Therefore, a renovated effort of theoretical and field studies is required and desirable in order to reach a better understanding of the efficiency and equity issues the knowledge economy poses to the employment relation. In fact, the emergence of a new employment contract, characterized by less sticky a relation between employer and employees asks for a major re-conceptualization of ILMs that cannot be limited to a diverse, more detailed classification, or to an update of their possible variants. Such re-conceptualizationcould be linked with the new organizational forms literature, i.e. with that body of research that models organizations as hybrids or networks.     

Introduction to Special Issue on POM Research on Emerging Markets

This special issue presents production and operations management research papers from emerging markets worldwide, focusing on their unique contexts, institutions and markets. Collectively, they offer insights into the unique operations management strategies and practices that firms face in emerging markets. The magnitude and pace of change is staggering. As a result, execution and managing growth in these emerging markets represents both huge operational and supply chain risks, and simultaneously vast opportunities. We are confident that these papers stimulate new operations management research while highlighting the effective use of different research methodologies. We welcome you to enjoy this special issue of POMS. We express our deep gratitude to editorial team for their support. We especially wish to thank the authors for their contributions to this special issue.     

电子网络环境下的营销渠道管理

首先,给出电子网络环境一个明确的定义,即特指那些在生产、经营或管理中使用了电子网络的企业的生存环境;接着根据电子网络和营销渠道管理的基本知识和理论,以营销渠道管理程序为分析框架,从渠道设计、渠道成员选择、物流配送、渠道协调和渠道控制等方面,讨论了电子网络环境下营销渠道管理可能发生的变化和特点,得到了一些初步的、但对企业具有指导意义的推论。     

电子市场中时间价格敏感需求下的交货期定价决策

电子市场中,如何通过交货期报价来增大需求、提高收益,对于网络营销企业来说是至关重要的.本文假定在一个包含网络营销企业与其客户的运作系统中,需求同时对价格与时间都敏感的条件下,以最优化自身收益为目标、以满足必须达到规定的服务水平为主要约束条件,构建了交货期定价决策模型.通过数值算例,探讨了在电子市场中消费者为价格敏感或交货期敏感时,网络营销企业的最优定价策略.上述结论可以为网络营销企业在电子市场中的定价决策提供有益的指导.     

Asymmetric Competition in B2B Spot Markets

We model strategic behavior of two types of suppliers in B2B spot markets: a supplier that has forward contracts and uses the spot market only for inventory liquidation, and a supplier that uses the spot market as its sole selling channel. We find that when the spot market demand is small, the supplier that has forward contracts has a higher incentive to invest in expanding the spot market. When the spot market demand exceeds a threshold size, this situation is reversed, and the supplier with no contracts benefits more from making the spot market more prevalent. We show that a supplier with forward contracts benefits from the existence of the spot market more than a supplier with no contracts and that this result holds with both negative and positive correlation between spot market demand and contracted demand. We find that suppliers producing only for the spot market gain from working in industries where contracted demand and spot market demand are positively correlated, whereas suppliers that have forward contracts benefit from working in industries with a negative correlation between demands, since it allows them to better manage risk. In addition, both total industry supply and spot market supply are higher in industries where demands are negatively correlated.     

Liquidity Constrained Markets Versus Debt Constrained Markets

This paper compares two different models in a common environment. The first model has liquidity constraints in that consumers save a single asset that they cannot sell short. The second model has debt constraints in that consumers cannot borrow so much that they would want to default, but is otherwise a standard complete markets model. Both models share the features that individuals are unable to completely insure against idiosyncratic shocks and that interest rates are lower than subjective discount rates. In a stochastic environment, the two models have quite different dynamic properties, with the debt constrained model exhibiting simple stochastic steady states, while the liquidity constrained model has greater persistence of shocks.     

易变质产品在带运输时间的二级供应链中的订购策略研究

研究了带运输时间的易变质产品的二级供应链库存模型。在有限计划期内,为补充下游分销商发出的订单,上游制造商以一定的生产速率进行生产。由于产品运输给分销商时需要花费时间与成本,在开始一段时间内分销商的订单得不到及时补充,只有当制造商的库存量达到最大时,才将产品运输给分销商。目标就是确定最优订购策略使得整个系统的总成本最小。通过分析成本函数的特点,证明了2种特殊情形下最优解的存在及唯一性。最后通过算例验证了最优策略的有效性。     

期货市场中洗钱行为的识别

在分析期货市场洗钱者的基本手法和行为特征的基础上,来设计洗钱行为的识别指标和规则;然后,根据期货交易数据中的交易价格、盈亏变动和账户关联等方面的特征筛选出涉嫌洗钱账户;最后,利用计算机仿真模型,对识别方法进行检验,确认了方法的有效性.该识别方法有利于提高洗钱行为的监管效率,为反洗钱工作提供了一种可行的操作手段.     

非完全市场条件下的0-水平资产定价法研究

资产的0-水平定价法是指投资者在特定的效用函数和财富水平状况下已取得的最优投资组合,不会因新的资产出现及其相应的定价而调整,即对新资产的定价使追求效用最大化的投资者对新资产的最佳持有量为零。因此对新资产采用0-水平定价不会使市场产生套利机会。本文主要介绍Lenberger等人提出的0-水平定价的概念、方法及性质,并且将这种定价方法与e-套利定价方法进行比较,然后证明了在局部完全市场里,0-水平定价与e-套利定价的一致性。     

An Approach to Assessing the Impacts of Incident-Free Transportation of Radioactive Materials: I. Air Transportation

Annual radiation doses and risks to passengers and crew are calculated for shipments of radioactive materials in passenger aircraft under accident-free and incident-free conditions (i.e., under normal transportation conditions). The 1982 database developed by Sandia National Laboratories is used, and calculations are made using RADTRAN 4.0. This paper is one of two papers estimating radiological risk associated with incident-free transportation of radioactive materials.     

运输问题时间优化算法

运输问题是线性规划中的一类特殊问题。适用于求解目标函数符合线性叠加关系的费用或距离问题,对于实际运输问题中的运输时间优化问题则难以给出优化解。本文结合科研实践提出了运输问题中有关时间优化的迭代算法模型,此模型可给出整体运输时间最优的运输方案。通过实际检验证明,此算法简便、稳定、计算结果符合实际情况。     

An Approach to Assessing the Impacts of Incident-Free Transportation of Radioactive Materials: II. Highway Transportation

Annual radiation doses and risks to the public living near, and traveling on, public highways, and occupational doses are calculated for highway shipments of radioactive materials under accident-free and incident-free conditions (i.e., under normal transportation conditions). The database developed by Sandia National Laboratories is used, and calculations are made using RADTRAN 4.0. This report is one of two reports estimating radiological risk associated with transportation of radioactive materials.     

双边市场条件下的技术许可策略研究

本文研究了双边市场条件下交叉网络外部性强度、潜在受许方数量及潜在市场需求规模对创新者技术许可策略的影响,分析了创新者实施有数量限制与无数量限制的固定许可策略的条件以及实施技术补贴的条件,并比较了固定许可策略与变动许可策略。研究表明,在双边市场条件下,创新者在技术市场实施固定许可策略一般情况下优于变动许可策略。但是当交叉网络外部性强度与潜在受许方数量较大,而授权产品市场相对于创新者自身产品市场的潜在需求规模较小时,创新者实施负变动许可费的技术补贴策略有可能优于固定许可策略。本文的研究对于在交叉网络外部性环境下创新者或技术平台的技术许可策略决策具有参考意义。