Inventory Record Inaccuracy,Double Marginalization,and RFID Adoption

Most retailers suffer from substantial discrepancies between inventory quantities recorded in the system and stocks truly available to customers. Promising full inventory transparency, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has often been suggested as a remedy to the problem. We consider inventory record inaccuracy in a supply chain model, where a Stackelberg manufacturer sets the wholesale price and a retailer determines how much to stock for sale to customers. We first analyze the impact of inventory record inaccuracy on optimal stocking decisions and profits. By contrasting optimal decisions in a decentralized supply chain with those in an integrated supply chain, we find that inventory record inaccuracy exacerbates the inefficiencies resulting from double marginalization in decentralized supply chains. Assuming RFID technology can eliminate the problem of inventory record inaccuracy, we determine the cost thresholds at which RFID adoption becomes profitable. We show that a decentralized supply chain benefits more from RFID technology, such that RFID adoption improves supply chain coordination.     

Leveraging middle managers’ brokerage for corporate entrepreneurship: The role of multilevel social capital configurations

Building on recent efforts to bring a socio-political perspective to social capital research, we develop and test a multilevel framework that explains why middle managers who occupy brokerage positions differ in their ability and willingness to engage in entrepreneurial behavior. More specifically, we provide a contextualized understanding of the links among middle managers' brokerage, their political-support ties, and their personal initiative. Results derived from data on 383 middle managers and 72 top managers in 34 business units indicate that political-support ties with top managers strengthen the relationship between middle managers’ brokerage and personal initiative. However, this positive effect depends on the social capital resources available in the focal business unit. It is attenuated in business units with a supportive and trusting social context and amplified in business units with high levels of internal connectedness. By uncovering these incompatibilities and complementarities, our study demonstrates the value of accounting for different social capital configurations and the interplay of their inherent social capital resources when examining the effects of brokerage on corporate entrepreneurship.     

Retail Strategies for Extended Warranty Sales and Impact on Manufacturer Base Warranties

Consider two competing manufacturers selling their products through the same retailer. If this retailer derives profits from extended warranty sales, the manufacturers face a dilemma in setting their base warranties. Although they have incentive to increase their warranties to make their products attractive to consumers, the retailer might prefer selling lower‐warranty products to enhance extended warranties sales. We develop a stylized model to determine and analyze optimal manufacturer and retailer strategies in this setting. Consistent with the ongoing decline in warranties for products that are sold through independent retailers, we show that these interactions exert downward pressure on manufacturer warranties. Rather than pitching the extended warranty at the checkout after customers have selected a certain product, we find that retailers can often benefit from inducing simultaneous consideration of product and extended warranty characteristics, for example by posting extended warranty information right on the product shelf.     

Multi-level Monte Carlo methods for the approximation of invariant measures of stochastic differential equations

We develop a framework that allows the use of the multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) methodology (Giles in Acta Numer. 24:259–328, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096249291500001X) to calculate expectations with respect to the invariant measure of an ergodic SDE. In that context, we study the (over-damped) Langevin equations with a strongly concave potential. We show that when appropriate contracting couplings for the numerical integrators are available, one can obtain a uniform-in-time estimate of the MLMC variance in contrast to the majority of the results in the MLMC literature. As a consequence, a root mean square error of $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon )$$ is achieved with $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-2})$$ complexity on par with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which, however, can be computationally intensive when applied to large datasets. Finally, we present a multi-level version of the recently introduced stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics method (Welling and Teh, in: Proceedings of the 28th ICML, 2011) built for large datasets applications. We show that this is the first stochastic gradient MCMC method with complexity $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-2}|\log {\varepsilon }|^{3})$$, in contrast to the complexity $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-3})$$ of currently available methods. Numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings.     

Developing management capability within a horizontal supply chain in performance measurement deployment and evolution: a Dynamic Capabilities and Goal Theory perspective

Abstract

Complex collaboration in rapidly changing business environments create challenges for management capability in Utility Horizontal Supply Chains (UHSCs) involving the deploying and evolving of performance measures. The aim of the study is twofold. First, there is a need to explore how management capability can be developed and used to deploy and evolve Performance Measurement (PM), both across a UHSC and within its constituent organisations, drawing upon a theoretical nexus of Dynamic Capability (DC) theory and complementary Goal Theory. Second, to make a contribution to knowledge by empirically building theory using these constructs to show the management motivations and behaviours within PM-based DCs. The methodology uses an interpretive theory building, multiple case-based approach (n = 3) as part of a USHC. The data collection methods include, interviews (n = 54), focus groups (n = 10), document analysis and participant observation (reflective learning logs) over a five-year period giving longitudinal data. The empirical findings lead to the development of a conceptual framework showing that management capabilities in driving PM deployment and evolution can be represented as multilevel renewal and incremental Dynamic Capabilities, which can be further understood in terms of motivation and behaviour by Goal-Theoretic constructs. In addition, three interrelated cross-cutting themes of management capabilities in consensus building, goal setting and resource change were identified. These management capabilities require carefully planned development and nurturing within the UHSC.     

THE RISE OF THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST: GERMAN LABOR MARKETS AND TRADE INTEGRATION

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and “the East” (China and Eastern Europe) in the period 1988–2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross‐regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade flows of other high‐income countries as instruments for regional import and export exposure. We find that the rise of the East in the world economy caused substantial job losses in German regions specialized in import‐competing industries, both in manufacturing and beyond. Regions specialized in export‐oriented industries, however, experienced even stronger employment gains and lower unemployment. In the aggregate, we estimate that this trade integration has caused some 442,000 additional jobs in the economy and contributed to retaining the manufacturing sector in Germany. This is almost exclusively driven by the rise of Eastern Europe, not by China. We also conduct an analysis at the individual worker level, and find that trade had a stabilizing overall effect on employment relationships.     

Innovationsberatung: Ansätze für Veränderung und Neues

In this paper we argue that a systematic organizational consulting approach can be supportive in fostering innovation and change processes in companies. We discuss the consulting approach in three steps: First, we present a scientific meta-definition of the term “innovation”, which helps to identify the major challenges for companies in being innovative. Second, we raise urgent questions which companies have to face in order to address these major challenges. Third, we discuss tools from our organizational consulting experience that support companies in answering these questions on their way to innovation success, therefore providing a useful basis for innovation consulting.     

Towards the price of leasing online

We consider online optimization problems in which certain goods have to be acquired in order to provide a service or infrastructure. Classically, decisions for such problems are considered as final: one buys the goods. However, in many real world applications, there is a shift away from the idea of buying goods. Instead, leasing is often a more flexible and lucrative business model. Research has realized this shift and recently initiated the theoretical study of leasing models (Anthony and Gupta in Proceedings of the integer programming and combinatorial optimization: 12th International IPCO Conference, Ithaca, NY, USA, June 25–27, 2007; Meyerson in Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2005), 23–25 Oct 2005, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2005; Nagarajan and Williamson in Discret Optim 10(4):361–370, 2013) We extend this line of work and suggest a more systematic study of leasing aspects for a class of online optimization problems. We provide two major technical results. We introduce the leasing variant of online set multicover and give an \(O\left( \log (mK)\log n\right) \)-competitive algorithm (with n, m, and K being the number of elements, sets, and leases, respectively). Our results also imply improvements for the non-leasing variant of online set cover. Moreover, we extend results for the leasing variant of online facility location. Nagarajan and Williamson (Discret Optim 10(4):361–370, 2013) gave an \(O\left( K\log n\right) \)-competitive algorithm for this problem (with n and K being the number of clients and leases, respectively). We remove the dependency on n (and, thereby, on time). In general, this leads to a bound of \(O\left( l_{\text {max}} \log l_{\text {max}} \right) \) (with the maximal lease length \(l_{\text {max}} \)). For many natural problem instances, the bound improves to \(O\left( K^2\right) \).