Bargaining within the Supply Chain and Its Implications in an Industry

Our main objective is to investigate the influence of the bargaining power within a chain on its industry. As a building block, we first discuss the implications of bargaining within a single chain by considering an asymmetric Nash bargaining over the wholesale price (BW). We show that both Manufacturer Stackelberg (MS) and vertical integration (VI) strategies are special cases of the BW contract. We then develop the Nash equilibrium in an industry with two supply chains that use BW. We identify the profit‐maximizing (coordinating) bargaining power within this industry. We show that when a chain is not monopolistic, VI does not coordinate the chain and that the MS contract, where the manufacturer has all the bargaining power, is coordinating when competition is intense. We find that the main determinant of the equilibrium in mature industries is to respond well to the actions of the competing chain rather than to directly maximize the profit of each chain. That is, the equilibrium does not necessarily maximize the profit of the entire industry. While a coordination of the industry could then increase the profitability of both chains, such a coordination is likely against antitrust law. Moreover, if one chain cannot change its actions, the other chain may unilaterally improve its profitability by deviating from the equilibrium. Our results lead to several predictions supported by empirical findings, such as that in competitive industries chains will work “close to” the MS contract.     

Private Labels: Facilitators or Impediments to Supply Chain Coordination

We consider a retailer’s decision of whether to develop an internally produced, private label version of a national brand and the role that this decision plays in coordinating the supply chain. Our model assumes that the perceived quality of the private label is lower than that of the national brand, and we allow for the two products to have different marginal costs. We further allow for a fixed development cost that the retailer must incur to develop private label capability, and distinguish two types of private labels depending upon whether they would or would not be developed as product line extensions by a vertically integrated supply chain. We refer to these two types as first‐best (FB) and non‐first‐best (NFB) product line extensions, respectively. When the private label can be characterized as a NFB product line extension, its development creates adverse cannibalization effects, yet it also helps to mitigate the effects of double marginalization with respect to the national brand. We characterize the conditions under which the retailer will develop private label capability, and distinguish among the conditions under which this is either beneficial or detrimental to the overall performance of the supply chain.     

The Impact of Competitive Strategy and Supply Chain Strategy on Business Performance: The Role of Environmental Uncertainty*

This article investigates the relationships among competitive strategy, supply chain strategy, and business performance while examining the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty. A total of 604 questionnaires were collected from three cities in China, and the statistical results show significant moderating effects of external environment on the relationships among competitive strategy, supply chain strategy, and business performance. Firms that primarily focus on a differentiation strategy emphasize an agile supply chain strategy. Cost leaders are inclined to implement both lean and agile supply chain strategies, but their emphasis on agile strategy is significantly greater in a volatile environment than in a stable environment. The choice of supply chain strategy does not appear to be an “either‐or” decision and firms could adopt either a lean or an agile strategy, or both, depending on the environment. This article provides significant managerial implications for supply chain practitioners to co‐align supply chain strategy and competitive strategy with the environment to improve performance.     

人口老龄化对企业出口国内增加值率的影响研究

中国经济正面临出口国内增加值率偏低和人口老龄化的双向挑战。基于2000~2013年中国微观企业数据,文章研究了人口老龄化对企业出口国内增加值率的影响。结果显示,人口老龄化会负向影响中国企业出口国内增加值率,且在克服内生性问题、进行多种稳健性检验后,这一结论依然成立。同时,这种负向影响主要是由进口中间品对国内中间品及劳动力的替代所导致的,而人口老龄化的成本效应对出口国内增加值率的不利影响相对较小,并且从贸易结构变动来看,人口老龄化并未通过降低企业从事加工贸易的比重,进而获得总体企业平均出口国内增加值率的“被动”提升。进一步研究还表明上述负向影响在混合贸易企业、劳动密集型企业、外资企业与人口净流出地区企业上体现得更为明显。     

Assessing convergence diagnostic tests for Bayesian Cox regression

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method generates samples from the posterior distribution and uses these samples to approximate expectations of quantities of interest. For the process, researchers have to decide whether the Markov chain has reached the desired posterior distribution. Using convergence diagnostic tests are very important to decide whether the Markov chain has reached the target distribution. Our interest in this study was to compare the performances of convergence diagnostic tests for all parameters of Bayesian Cox regression model with different number of iterations by using a simulation and a real lung cancer dataset.     

偏正态随机波动模型及其实证检验

首先构建了有杠杆效应的随机波动模型(SV-L),证明了其波动随机项的条件分布为两个偏正态分布,由此称该模型为偏正态随机波动模型(SV-SN).接下来讨论了SV-SN模型的经济含义以及对应随机波动项的统计特征.最后利用沪深两市的指数收益数据对模型进行了实证研究,其结论为:相对于一般的SV模型,SV-SN模型的拟合效果更好;新息具有减弱后期波动之效应;与理论预期一致,单位负新息比单位正新息引致的波动要大.     

养殖大菱鲆血细胞形态和相关生理指标的测定

研究了大菱鲆血细胞的类型、形态以及血液生理学指标.大菱鲆的血细胞可区分为红细胞、淋巴细胞、单核细胞、嗜中性粒细胞和血栓细胞5种类型,没有发现嗜酸性粒细胞和嗜碱性粒细胞.在白细胞中,血栓细胞和小淋巴细胞较小,嗜中性粒细胞和单核细胞较大.血细胞计数测得红细胞密度为(2.73±0.22)×106个/mm3,白细胞密度为(1.79±0.25)×104个/mm3.淋巴细胞、单核细胞、嗜中性粒细胞和血栓细胞在白细胞中所占的比例分别为:(24.72±6.26)%,(5.26±1.95)%,(13.45±3.31)%和(56.60±9.52)%.血红蛋白含量为(6.63±0.58)g/100mL,红细胞渗透脆性为(0.38±0.04)%NaCl,凝血时间为(80±12)s.     

Acceleration of the Multiple-Try Metropolis algorithm using antithetic and stratified sampling

The Multiple-Try Metropolis is a recent extension of the Metropolis algorithm in which the next state of the chain is selected among a set of proposals. We propose a modification of the Multiple-Try Metropolis algorithm which allows for the use of correlated proposals, particularly antithetic and stratified proposals. The method is particularly useful for random walk Metropolis in high dimensional spaces and can be used easily when the proposal distribution is Gaussian. We explore the use of quasi Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to generate highly stratified samples. A series of examples is presented to evaluate the potential of the method.     

Markov Chain Monte Carlo in small worlds

As the number of applications for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) grows, the power of these methods as well as their shortcomings become more apparent. While MCMC yields an almost automatic way to sample a space according to some distribution, its implementations often fall short of this task as they may lead to chains which converge too slowly or get trapped within one mode of a multi-modal space. Moreover, it may be difficult to determine if a chain is only sampling a certain area of the space or if it has indeed reached stationarity. In this paper, we show how a simple modification of the proposal mechanism results in faster convergence of the chain and helps to circumvent the problems described above. This mechanism, which is based on an idea from the field of “small-world” networks, amounts to adding occasional “wild” proposals to any local proposal scheme. We demonstrate through both theory and extensive simulations, that these new proposal distributions can greatly outperform the traditional local proposals when it comes to exploring complex heterogenous spaces and multi-modal distributions. Our method can easily be applied to most, if not all, problems involving MCMC and unlike many other remedies which improve the performance of MCMC it preserves the simplicity of the underlying algorithm.     

地区间农业生产效率差异研究

本文运用非参数Maimquist生产率指数评价了1990—2005年中国各省农业经济效率逐期变化动态情况，并利用该指数可分解为技术进步、技术效率改进特性，详细考察中国各区域发展不平衡的具体原因，旨在为促进农业经济健康发展提供科学借鉴。