A three‐stage procurement optimization problem under uncertainty

This article examines a problem faced by a firm procuring a material input or good from a set of suppliers. The cost to procure the material from any given supplier is concave in the amount ordered from the supplier, up to a supplier‐specific capacity limit. This NP‐hard problem is further complicated by the observation that capacities are often uncertain in practice, due for instance to production shortages at the suppliers, or competition from other firms. We accommodate this uncertainty in a worst‐case (robust) fashion by modeling an adversarial entity (which we call the “follower”) with a limited procurement budget. The follower reduces supplier capacity to maximize the minimum cost required for our firm to procure its required goods. To guard against uncertainty, the firm can “protect” any supplier at a cost (e.g., by signing a contract with the supplier that guarantees supply availability, or investing in machine upgrades that guarantee the supplier's ability to produce goods at a desired level), ensuring that the anticipated capacity of that supplier will indeed be available. The problem we consider is thus a three‐stage game in which the firm first chooses which suppliers' capacities to protect, the follower acts next to reduce capacity from unprotected suppliers, and the firm then satisfies its demand using the remaining capacity. We formulate a three‐stage mixed‐integer program that is well‐suited to decomposition techniques and develop an effective cutting‐plane algorithm for its solution. The corresponding algorithmic approach solves a sequence of scaled and relaxed problem instances, which enables solving problems having much larger data values when compared to standard techniques. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Should competing firms reveal their capacity?

In this article, we explore when firms have an incentive to hide (or reveal) their capacity information. We consider two firms that aim to maximize profits over time and face limited capacity. One or both of the firms have private information on their own capacity levels, and they update their beliefs about their rival's capacity based on their observation of the other firm's output. We focus on credible revelation mechanisms—a firm may signal its capacity through overproduction, compared to its myopic production levels. We characterize conditions when high‐capacity firms may have the incentive and capability to signal their capacity levels by overproduction. We show that prior beliefs about capacity play a crucial, and surprisingly complex, role on whether the firm would prefer to reveal its capacity or not. A surprising result is that, despite the fact that it may be best for the high‐capacity firm to overproduce to reveal its capacity when capacity information is private, it may end up with more profits than if all capacity information were public knowledge in the first place. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Efficient distributions of arms‐control inspection effort

A rule that constrains decision‐makers is enforced by an inspector who is supplied with a fixed level of inspection resources—inspection personnel, equipment, or time. How should the inspector distribute its inspection resources over several independent inspectees? What minimum level of resources is required to deter all violations? Optimal enforcement problems occur in many contexts; the motivating application for this study is the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in support of the Treaty on the Non‐Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Using game‐theoretic models, the resource level adequate for deterrence is characterized in a two‐inspectee problem with inspections that are imperfect in the sense that violations can be missed. Detection functions, or probabilities of detecting a violation, are assumed to be increasing in inspection resources, permitting optimal allocations over inspectees to be described both in general and in special cases. When detection functions are convex, inspection effort should be concentrated on one inspectee chosen at random, but when they are concave it should be spread deterministicly over the inspectees. Our analysis provides guidance for the design of arms‐control verification operations, and implies that a priori constraints on the distribution of inspection effort can result in significant inefficiencies. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.     

网络游戏赌博性质分析

网络游戏产业快速发展的同时,赌博现象混迹其中。网络游戏赌博与传统赌博只是形式上的不同,其实质就是一种赌博行为。只有从教育、法制、监督、自律四方面综合治理,才能使这个行业健康发展。     

军用认知无线电网络中功率控制博弈算法的探讨

通过对比军用认知无线功率控制博弈模型与一些经典的功率控制博弈算法,提出了一种认知无线电网络中的功率控制的博弈算法。通过仿真结果性能分析,证明算法具有一定的优越性,并且能够为军事无线通信提供一定的理论依据和现实作用。     

Efficiency of equilibria in restricted uniform machine scheduling with total weighted completion time as social cost

In the last decade, there has been much progress in understanding scheduling problems in which selfish jobs aim to minimize their individual completion time. Most of this work has focused on makespan minimization as social objective. In contrast, we consider as social cost the total weighted completion time, that is, the sum of the agent costs, a standard definition of welfare in economics. In our setting, jobs are processed on restricted uniform parallel machines, where each machine has a speed and is only capable of processing a subset of jobs; a job's cost is its weighted completion time; and each machine sequences its jobs in weighted shortest processing time (WSPT) order. Whereas for the makespan social cost the price of anarchy is not bounded by a constant in most environments, we show that for our minsum social objective the price of anarchy is bounded above by a small constant, independent of the instance. Specifically, we show that the price of anarchy is exactly 2 for the class of unit jobs, unit speed instances where the finite processing time values define the edge set of a forest with the machines as nodes. For the general case of mixed job strategies and restricted uniform machines, we prove that the price of anarchy equals 4. From a classical machine scheduling perspective, our results establish the same constant performance guarantees for WSPT list scheduling. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

地方物流供应商“偷懒”行为监管机制研究

军民融合现代军事物流体系中,地方物流供应商往往会"偷懒",这必将损害军民融合现代军事物流体系的整体绩效。首先描述了"偷懒"行为及其危害性,从机制入手,基于博弈论建立地方物流供应商"偷懒"行为监管机制;分析并证明了监管机制的有效性。这一机制的构建对于监管地方物流供应商具有重要作用。     

Reconciling strategic studies … with itself: a common framework for choosing among strategies

Three distinct, and seemingly irreconcilable, schools of thought are identified within the strategic studies literature. One which searches for “universal principles of war,” a second, “context-dependent,” approach that seeks to embed each instance of warfare within its concurrent social, political, technological milieu and, finally a “paradoxical logic” school, which equates strategy with the generation of uncertainty. The author offers some intuitive concepts from non-cooperative game theory to develop a “dominate-mix” approach to strategy choice. In doing so, he helps to reconcile these disparate approaches and provides a simple framework to assist researchers in framing military decisions as well as to assist planners in choosing among strategies.     

Interchange fee rate,merchant discount rate,and retail price in a credit card network: A game‐theoretic analysis

We consider two game‐theoretic settings to determine the optimal values of an issuer's interchange fee rate, an acquirer's merchant discount rate, and a merchant's retail price in a credit card network. In the first setting, we investigate a two‐stage game problem in which the issuer and the acquirer first negotiate the interchange fee rate, and the acquirer and the retailer then determine their merchant discount rate and retail price, respectively. In the second setting, motivated by the recent US bill “H.R. 2695,” we develop a three‐player cooperative game in which the issuer, the acquirer, and the merchant form a grand coalition and bargain over the interchange fee rate and the merchant discount rate. Following the cooperative game, the retailer makes its retail pricing decision. We derive both the Shapley value‐ and the nucleolus‐characterized, and globally‐optimal unique rates for the grand coalition. Comparing the two game settings, we find that the participation of the merchant in the negotiation process can result in the reduction of both rates. Moreover, the stability of the grand coalition in the cooperative game setting may require that the merchant should delegate the credit card business only to the issuer and the acquirer with sufficiently low operation costs. We also show that the grand coalition is more likely to be stable and the U.S. bill “H.R. 2695” is thus more effective, if the degree of division of labor in the credit card network is higher as the merchant, acquirer, and issuer are more specialized in the retailing, acquiring, and issuing operations, respectively. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

军事攻防中的多属性资源分配对策模型

针对资源受限情形下的两阶段攻防资源分配问题,提出一种基于多属性决策的资源分配对策模型。防守者首先将有限的防护资源分配到不同的目标上,继而进攻者选择一种威胁组合方式对目标实施打击。基于博弈论相关知识,模型的求解结果可以使防守者最小化自身损失,使进攻者最大化进攻收益。同时,针对模型的特点,给出了一些推论和证明。通过一个示例验证了模型的合理性以及相关推论的准确性,能够为攻、防双方规划决策提供辅助支持。