The Effect of Competition on Recovery Strategies

Manufacturers often face a choice of whether to recover the value in their end‐of‐life products through remanufacturing. In many cases, firms choose not to remanufacture, as they are (rightly) concerned that the remanufactured product will cannibalize sales of the higher‐margin new product. However, such a strategy may backfire for manufacturers operating in industries where their end‐of‐life products (cell phones, tires, computers, automotive parts, etc.) are attractive to third‐party remanufacturers, who may seriously cannibalize sales of the original manufacturer. In this paper, we develop models to support a manufacturer's recovery strategy in the face of a competitive threat on the remanufactured product market. We first analyze the competition between new and remanufactured products produced by a monopolist manufacturer and identify conditions under which the firm would choose not to remanufacture its products. We then characterize the potential profit loss due to external remanufacturing competition and analyze two entry‐deterrent strategies: remanufacturing and preemptive collection. We find that a firm may choose to remanufacture or preemptively collect its used products to deter entry, even when the firm would not have chosen to do so under a pure monopoly environment. Finally, we discuss conditions under which each strategy is more beneficial.     

Value of Information in Closed Loop Supply Chains

We explore the value of information (VOI) in the context of a firm that faces uncertainty with respect to demand, product return, and product recovery (yield). The operational decision of interest in matching supply with demand is the quantity of new product to order. Our objective is to evaluate the VOI from reducing one or more types of uncertainties, where value is measured by the reduction in total expected holding and shortage costs. We start with a single period model with normally distributed demands and returns, and restrict the analysis to the value of full information (VOFI) on one or more types of uncertainty. We develop estimators that are predictive of the value and sensitivity of (combinations of) different information types. We find that there is no dominance in value amongst the different types of information, and that there is an additional pay‐off from investing in more than one type. We then extend our analysis to the multi‐period case, where returns in a period are correlated with demands in the previous period, and study the value of partial information (VOPI) as well as full information. We demonstrate that our results from the single period model (adapted for VOPI) carry‐over exactly. Furthermore, a comparison with uniformly distributed demand and return show that these results are robust with respect to distributional assumptions.     

Optimal algorithms for uncovering synteny problem

The syntenic distance between two genomes is the minimum number of fusions, fissions, and translocations that can transform one genome to the other, ignoring the gene order within chromosomes. As the problem is NP-hard in general, some particular classes of synteny instances, such as linear synteny, exact synteny and nested synteny, are examined in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new special class of synteny instances, called uncovering synteny. We first present a polynomial time algorithm to solve the connected case of uncovering synteny optimally. By performing only intra-component moves, we then solve the unconnected case of uncovering synteny. We will further calculate the diameters of connected and unconnected uncovering synteny, respectively.     

The web proxy location problem in general tree of rings networks

The Web proxy location problem in general networks is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we study the problem in networks showing a general tree of rings topology. We improve the results of the tree case in literature and get an exact algorithm with time complexity O(nhk), where n is the number of nodes in the tree, h is the height of the tree (the server is in the root of the tree), and k is the number of web proxies to be placed in the net. For the case of networks with a general tree of rings topology we present an exact algorithm with O(kn ²) time complexity.This research has been supported by NSF of China (No. 10371028) and the Educational Department grant of Zhejiang Province (No. 20030622).     

Communicating uncertainty in national security intelligence: Expert and nonexpert interpretations of and preferences for verbal and numeric formats

Organizations in several domains including national security intelligence communicate judgments under uncertainty using verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) instead of numeric probabilities (e.g., 75% chance), despite research indicating that the former have variable meanings across individuals. In the intelligence domain, uncertainty is also communicated using terms such as low, moderate, or high to describe the analyst's confidence level. However, little research has examined how intelligence professionals interpret these terms and whether they prefer them to numeric uncertainty quantifiers. In two experiments (N = 481 and 624, respectively), uncertainty communication preferences of expert (n = 41 intelligence analysts in Experiment 1) and nonexpert intelligence consumers were elicited. We examined which format participants judged to be more informative and simpler to process. We further tested whether participants treated verbal probability and confidence terms as independent constructs and whether participants provided coherent numeric probability translations of verbal probabilities. Results showed that although most nonexperts favored the numeric format, experts were about equally split, and most participants in both samples regarded the numeric format as more informative. Experts and nonexperts consistently conflated probability and confidence. For instance, confidence intervals inferred from verbal confidence terms had a greater effect on the location of the estimate than the width of the estimate, contrary to normative expectation. Approximately one-fourth of experts and over one-half of nonexperts provided incoherent numeric probability translations for the terms likely and unlikely when the elicitation of best estimates and lower and upper bounds were briefly spaced by intervening tasks.     

网上交易中诚信交易激励机制设计

网上交易中日益增长的欺诈行为阻碍了人们参与网上交易的积极性.激励参与方在网上交易中诚信交易非常必要,而现有的简单反馈机制难以实现激励诚信交易的功能.提出了一种新的网上交易市场中激励诚信交易的机制——注册押金和交易保证金制度.该机制不仅把交易前的交易保证金与交易方信誉指数结合起来防范交易方欺诈,而且重构了每次交易可获得的信誉指数计算方法以激励交易方在长期中保持诚信.通过对该机制下交易方行为的博弈分析,证明了诚信不仅是单阶段博弈的纳什均衡策略,还是长期博弈的子博弈完美纳什均衡策略.最后,通过随机选取eBay市场的交易数据,对机制进行了模拟,并验证了其有效性.     

Development of hospice and palliative care in the United States

More than 30 years have passed since palliative care was introduced in the United States, and what began as a small rebellion has evolved into a fairly large health care industry. Although the palliative care movement has considerably improved the care given to those at the end of life, many challenges remain for palliative care providers in the United States. This article discusses the history of hospice and palliative care in the United States, the Medicare Hospice Benefit, the growth of hospice and palliative care, and challenges such as the need for regulatory change, workforce issues, improving access to care, and improving the quality of palliative care.