The defence firm of the future

This paper offers the personal view of a senior executive in the Defence Procurement Agency about the future requirements of the defence industry’s principal UK customer. The focus here is on trying to identify the type of corporate behaviour and range of skill sets that the UK Government will need from defence suppliers, both primes and supply chain companies in the future. The concluding message from this ‘Customer View’ is that there is likely to be a continuing market for the company that specializes in delivering defence capability. It will be a company that will be looking for a long‐term relationship, with a specialist knowledge of its various national customers and a willingness to work openly and closely with them. It will be agile in its ability to bring together diverse technologies, to package them as a system and to deliver them either as hardware or as a service. Such suppliers will also need to innovate and to adapt at least as rapidly as the threats that they seek to counter.     

Impacts of sequential acquisition,market competition mode,and confidentiality on information flow

We investigate information flow in a setting in which 2 retailers order from a supplier and sell to a market with uncertain demand. Each retailer has access to a signal. The retailers can disclose signals to each other (horizontal information sharing), while the supplier can solicit signals by offering retailers differential payments as incentives for signal disclosure (vertical information acquisition). In the base setting, market competition is in quantity, and a retailer can fully infer the signal that the other retailer discloses to the supplier. We show that the supplier prefers to sequentialize the procedure for information acquisition. Moreover, vertical information acquisition by the supplier is a strategic complement to horizontal information sharing between the retailers to establish information flow. In the equilibrium, the retailers have no incentive to exchange signals, but system wide information transparency can be realized through a combination of information acquisition and inference. We further study the signaling effect, whereby the supplier utilizes wholesale pricing as an instrument to affect the retailers' inference of the shared signals, and price competition to explore their impacts on the supplier's preference for sequential acquisition and the sustainability of information flow.     

Data-driven research in retail operations—A review

We review the operations research/management science literature on data-driven methods in retail operations. This line of work has grown rapidly in recent years, thanks to the availability of high-quality data, improvements in computing hardware, and parallel developments in machine learning methodologies. We survey state-of-the-art studies in three core aspects of retail operations—assortment optimization, order fulfillment, and inventory management. We then conclude the paper by pointing out some interesting future research possibilities for our community.     

Markets for surplus components with a strategic supplier

We study markets for surplus components, which allow manufacturers with excess component inventory to sell to firms with a shortage. Recent developments in internet commerce have the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of such markets. We develop a one‐period model in which a monopolist supplier sells to a number of independent manufacturers who are uncertain about demand for final goods. After uncertainty is resolved, the manufacturers have the opportunity to trade. Because uncertainty is over demand functions, the model allows us to endogenize both the price of final goods and the price of components in wholesale and surplus markets. We derive conditions on demand uncertainty that determine whether a surplus market will increase or decrease supplier profits. Increased costs of transacting on the surplus market may benefit manufacturers, because of the impact of these costs on the supplier's pricing power. The surplus market can decrease overall efficiency of the supply chain, since the benefit of better allocation of components may be outweighed by an increased double‐marginalization effect. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

面向网络化无人机集群的计算换通信分布式任务调度方法

针对网络化无人机集群任务自主协同问题以及市场竞拍法的优缺点,提出“计算换通信”思想及其相应的分布式任务调度方法。通过对显式和隐式冲突任务的分析,建立任务相关智能体集合。提出基于任务抑制的局部优化方法,用于提前消解部分任务冲突,以减少算法迭代次数。设计基于历史竞标信息的智能体位置推断法,为局部优化提供必要的信息输入。基于组网仿真平台与集群救援场景开展蒙特卡罗仿真实验,结果表明,相比于市场竞拍法中具有代表性的基于共识的捆绑算法和性能影响算法,所提方法能够获得更少的迭代次数、更短的收敛时间以及更优的调度性能。     

效率、公平与公共政策

效率是社会经济发展的重要保证,而公平是衡量人类文明的重要尺度,是维护社会稳定的价值基础。效率与公平是辩证的对立统一,既有矛盾性又有统一性。公共政策的关键就是要协调与整合二者之间的关系,确保既能提高经济效率,又能实现社会公平——借助市场机制达到资源的有效配置,以提高效率;依靠社会主义制度解决财富分配不公,以彰显公平。将效率与公平完美地结合于公共政策之中,是社会主义优越性的充分体现。     

电力市场环境下发电厂机组检修计划

分析了传统的统一调度下和电力市场环境下发电厂机组检修计划的不同,在此基础上提出不同于以往的检修计划方法。以检修费用、电价收益损失和违约金之和最小为目标函数,然后采用0-1整数规划的直接枚举法求解。最后通过算例论证了该方法的可行性。     

对房地产策划的理性思考

随着房地产业的迅速发展,房地产策划在观念、专业化、组织、创新、协作和信息等方面存在着一些与发展不和谐的因素,通过对房地产策划的危机进行理性思考,以寻找战胜危机的可靠途径。在全面分析房地产策划危机的基础上,从贯穿市场意识、主动创造效益、强化整合功能、塑造品牌、引进管理等方面寻找形成房地产策划核心竞争力的源泉,以战胜暂时的危机。其结果证明了房地产策划仍然具有强大的生命力,暂时的危机一定能被克服。     

Dynamic pricing in a trade-in program with replacement and new customers

Trade-in programs have been widely adopted to enhance repeat purchase from replacement customers. Considering that a market consists of replacement and new segments, we study the joint and dynamic decisions on the selling price of new product (hereafter, “selling price”) and the trade-in price involved in the program. By adopting a vertical product differentiation choice model, we investigate two scenarios in this paper. In the base model, the manufacturer has sufficiently large production capacity to fulfill the customer demand. We characterize the structural properties of the joint pricing decisions and compare them with the optimal pricing policy under regular selling. We further propose a semi-dynamic trade-in program, under which the new product is sold at a fixed price and the trade-in price can be adjusted dynamically. Numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the dynamic and semi-dynamic trade-in programs. In an extended model, we consider the scenario in which the manufacturer stocks a batch of new products in the beginning of the selling horizon and the inventory cannot be replenished. Following a revenue management framework, we characterize the structural properties with respect to time period and inventory level of new products.     

基于成品油有限竞争市场的军油筹措战略研究

对国家成品油市场进行分析，认为目前国内成品油市场是典型的双寡头垄断有限竞争市场。通过对成品油市场主体厂商行为博弈的讨论，得出产量博弈的状况近期不会出现，价格博弈将使企业走入囚徒困境的结论。根据分析针对性地提出军油筹措战略，为相关决策提供参考。