US–China military relations: competition and cooperation

ABSTRACT

China’s efforts to build a ‘new type of great power relations’ and a ‘new type of military-to-military relations’ do not constitute a major turning point in relations with the United States. Political relations set limits on military cooperation, and the two sides have been unable to construct a sustainable strategic basis for relations. This has contributed to an ‘on-again, off-again’ pattern in military ties. Trends show a pattern of frequent disruptions in military-to-military relations from 2000 to 2010, followed by an increase in interactions beginning in 2012. Nevertheless, obstacles on both sides are likely to limit mutual trust and constrain future development of military-to-military relations.     

Optimal pricing and scheduling control of product shipping

In this article, we seek to understand how a capacity‐constrained seller optimally prices and schedules product shipping to customers who are heterogeneous on willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to wait (WTW). The capacity‐constrained seller does not observe each customer's WTP and WTW and knows only the aggregate distributions of WTP and WTW. The seller's problem is modeled as an M/M/N_s queueing model with multiclass customers and multidimensional information screening. We contribute to the literature by providing an optimal and efficient algorithm. Furthermore, we numerically find that customers with a larger waiting cost enjoys a higher scheduling priority, but customers with higher valuation do not necessarily get a higher scheduling priority. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 215–227, 2015     

Does Spoiling Work? Assessing the Impact of Spoilers on Civil War Peace Agreements

Scholars and policymakers argue that violent actors – termed ‘spoilers’ – pose a significant threat to civil war peace agreements. Yet existing research, which is overly reliant on single-case studies, has not effectively determined how prevalent spoiling is, or thoroughly examined what its ultimate effects are on peace agreements. This article draws on a newly constructed cross-national dataset of spoiling following 241 civil war peace agreements in the post-Cold War era to analyze spoiling. It finds that spoiling intended to terminate an agreement is not as common as typically assumed, but still plagues a sizeable number of peace agreements. Moreover, most actors who resort to this strategy typically fail in their goals and the agreement is not at risk, despite the high publicity and attention given to these threats. Yet particular types of actors, most notably paramilitaries and state security forces excluded from the agreement, can pose a significant threat to peace.     

Inventory competition with yield reliability improvement

This article studies the inventory competition under yield uncertainty. Two firms with random yield compete for substitutable demand: If one firm suffers a stockout, which can be caused by yield failure, its unsatisfied customers may switch to its competitor. We first study the case in which two competing firms decide order quantities based on the exogenous reliability levels. The results from the traditional inventory competition are generalized to the case with yield uncertainty and we find that quantity and reliability can be complementary instruments in the competition. Furthermore, we allow the firms to endogenously improve their yield reliability before competing in quantity. We show that the reliability game is submodular under some assumptions. The results indicate that the competition in quantity can discourage the reliability improvement. With an extensive numerical study, we also demonstrate the robustness of our analytical results in more general settings. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 107–126, 2015     

Technical note – operational statistics: Properties and the risk‐averse case

Consider a repeated newsvendor problem for managing the inventory of perishable products. When the parameter of the demand distribution is unknown, it has been shown that the traditional separated estimation and optimization (SEO) approach could lead to suboptimality. To address this issue, an integrated approach called operational statistics (OS) was developed by Chu et al., Oper Res Lett 36 (2008) 110–116. In this note, we first study the properties of this approach and compare its performance with that of the traditional SEO approach. It is shown that OS is consistent and superior to SEO. The benefit of using OS is larger when the demand variability is higher. We then generalize OS to the risk‐averse case under the conditional value‐at‐risk (CVaR) criterion. To model risk from both demand sampling and future demand uncertainty, we introduce a new criterion, called the total CVaR, and find the optimal OS under this new criterion. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 206–214, 2015     

Transformations of node‐balanced routing problems

This article describes a polynomial transformation for a class of unit‐demand vehicle routing problems, named node‐balanced routing problems (BRP), where the number of nodes on each route is restricted to be in an interval such that the workload across the routes is balanced. The transformation is general in that it can be applied to single or multiple depot, homogeneous or heterogeneous fleet BRPs, and any combination thereof. At the heart of the procedure lies transforming the BRP into a generalized traveling salesman problem (TSP), which can then be transformed into a TSP. The transformed graph exhibits special properties which can be exploited to significantly reduce the number of arcs, and used to construct a formulation for the resulting TSP that amounts to no more than that of a constrained assignment problem. Computational results on a number of instances are presented. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 370–387, 2015     

Military expenditure and economic growth in Middle Eastern countries and Turkey: a non-linear panel data approach

The economic growth effects of military expenditure have been the subject of a large literature in defence economics. Theories on the economic impacts of military expenditure greatly differ and include arguments that they either enhance economic growth or crowd out productive investments. Empirical literature on defence expenditure and economic growth nexus generally employs linear specifications to investigate the impact of defence expenditures on economic growth. Although it is now well established that many economic variables may have a non-linear data-generating mechanism, it seems that this reality has long been neglected in empirical work on defence–growth nexus. This paper attempts to fill this gap by employing non-linear panel data models to examine the effects of military expenditures on economic growth for Middle Eastern countries and Turkey, for the time period 1988–2012. Results show that the effect of military expenditure on economic growth is nonlinear such that the state of the economy actually determines the effect of the former on the latter. This is important not only in showing asymmetric relationship between these variables but also in revealing the reasons of mixed results of earlier literature.     

Bullwhip and reverse bullwhip effects under the rationing game

When an unreliable supplier serves multiple retailers, the retailers may compete with each other by inflating their order quantities in order to obtain their desired allocation from the supplier, a behavior known as the rationing game. We introduce capacity information sharing and a capacity reservation mechanism in the rationing game and show that a Nash equilibrium always exists. Moreover, we provide conditions guaranteeing the existence of the reverse bullwhip effect upstream, a consequence of the disruption caused by the supplier. In contrast, we also provide conditions under which the bullwhip effect does not exist. In addition, we show that a smaller unit reservation payment leads to more bullwhip and reverse bullwhip effects, while a large unit underage cost results in a more severe bullwhip effect. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 203–216, 2017     

Performance analysis of the cultural and creative industry: a network‐based approach

The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in Taiwan have gradually contributed to the national economy under the impetus of government policies. We employ a two‐stage data envelopment analysis model with an additive efficiency decomposition approach to measure the profitability and marketability of 22 Taiwanese cultural and creative companies. Furthermore, we employ the network‐based ranking approach to identify benchmark inputs/outputs, and the strengths and weakness of each company. Our empirical results show that the profitability of the cultural and creative companies is better than their marketability. Companies in the industries of publishing, creative life, popular music, and cultural content averagely perform better than those in the other three types of CCIs in terms of profitability. Companies in the creative life industry are on average more efficient than those in the other five types of CCIs in terms of marketability. The profitability/marketability matrix of cultural and creative companies is also presented.     

On the orbit characteristics of the M/G/ 1 retrial queue

In teletraffic applications of retrial queues only the service zone is observable. Another part of a retrial queue, the orbit, which represents the delay before repeated attempts to get service, cannot be observed. Thus, it is very important to get general results about behavior of the orbit. We investigate two characteristics of the orbit, namely, the orbit busy period and the orbit idle period, which seem to be very useful from this point of view. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.