Franchising cooperation through chance cross‐constrained games

This paper explores the role of franchising arrangements in the context of game theory. We assume a single franchisor and a single franchisee channel and address the impact of fixed lump‐sum fees, royalties, wholesale price, and retail price on the franchise contracts. We start with the chance cross‐constrained noncooperative situation where the franchisor, as the leader, first specifies his/her strategies. The franchisee, as the follower, then decides on his/her decision. We then relax the assumption of franchisee's inability to influence the franchisor's decisions and discuss cooperative situation between the franchisor and the franchisee. Nash's bargaining model is utilized to select the best Pareto‐efficient payment scheme for the franchisor and the franchisee to achieve their cooperation. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 669–685, 2000     

Timely exposure of a secret project: Which activities to monitor?

A defender wants to detect as quickly as possible whether some attacker is secretly conducting a project that could harm the defender. Security services, for example, need to expose a terrorist plot in time to prevent it. The attacker, in turn, schedules his activities so as to remain undiscovered as long as possible. One pressing question for the defender is: which of the project's activities to focus intelligence efforts on? We model the situation as a zero‐sum game, establish that a late‐start schedule defines a dominant attacker strategy, and describe a dynamic program that yields a Nash equilibrium for the zero‐sum game. Through an innovative use of cooperative game theory, we measure the harm reduction thanks to each activity's intelligence effort, obtain insight into what makes intelligence effort more effective, and show how to identify opportunities for further harm reduction. We use a detailed example of a nuclear weapons development project to demonstrate how a careful trade‐off between time and ease of detection can reduce the harm significantly.     

Purchase and retrieval competition for seasonal produce

We study the competition problem of purchase and multiretrieval of perishable seasonal produce, where wholesalers purchase and stock their products in the first period, and then retrieve and sell them in subsequent periods. We first consider the duopoly case and assume that the prices are exogenous and fluctuate. In each period, after the price realization, the wholesalers retrieve some stock from their warehouses to satisfy their demands. One wholesaler's unsatisfied customers can switch to another and be satisfied by its left retrieved products. Any unsold retrieved stock has no salvage value and any unsatisfied demand is lost. The unretrieved stock is carried to the next period at a perishable rate. The wholesalers compete for the substitute demand by determining their own purchase and retrieval quantities. We show the existence and uniqueness of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, and that the Nash equilibrium strategy has the simple “sell-down-to” structure. We also consider the general N-person game and show the existence of the Nash equilibrium, and characterize the structure of the equilibrium strategy for the symmetric case. In addition, we consider the case with endogenous prices, and show that the problem reduces to a repeated newsvendor game with price and inventory competition. We derive the conditions under which a unique Nash equilibrium exists and characterize the equilibrium strategy. Finally, we conduct numerical studies to examine the impacts of the model parameters on the equilibrium outcomes and to generate managerial insights.     

军事物流服务商准入标准设置和甄选研究综述

军事物流服务商甄选研究是新军事变革下供应商管理发展的重要方向,是有效完成后勤保障任务、顺利实施作战行动的重要保证。基于此,本文从供应商关系理论和发展、物流服务商指标体系选择以及结合其他方法对物流服务商甄选三个方面对国内外研究现状进行总结概述,对整个军事物流服务商的选择过程加以研究,将其科学客观地运用于军事物流服务商选择的实际操作中,对于加强军事物流服务商需求管理、提高选择质效以及优化工作流程具有重大意义。同时,分析现有研究成果的不足,并对其未来发展前景提出展望,针对性地提出了军事物流服务商初步准入标准以及后续复选的方法,为军事物流服务商选择体系的完善提供参考。     

航天器轨道追逃态势分析的水平集方法

航天器轨道追逃是当前航天动力学与控制领域的研究热点。针对轨道追逃定性问题开展研究,提出了一种综合运用降维动力学模型和后向可达集的航天器近距离轨道追逃态势分析方法,以支撑任务可行性分析;通过在视线旋转坐标系下推导博弈系统降维动力学模型,建立近距离追逃定性问题模型,减少了状态空间维度;使用目标集的后向可达集描述捕获区并划分追逃状态空间,基于水平集方法建立可达集在降维动力学模型中演化的动态HJI(Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs)偏微分方程,并设计WENO-TVD求解器数值计算HJI方程终值问题粘性解,完成了追逃目标集的准确描述并避免了可能出现的终端奇异现象。通过不同推力构型的追逃场景数值仿真验证了方法的有效性,展现了一次计算批量化处理初始态势的功能。     

多目标模糊微分对策

多目标问题是微分对策研究的一个重要而困难的方面.多目标微分对策是动态向量对策,结合了多目标规划与动态对策,扩大了微分对策在分析冲突问题时解决问题的范围,多具有非线性和不确定性特点.为避免非线性带来求解上的困难和处理不确定信息等,基于T-S模糊微分对策思想,构造出多目标微分对策的模糊线性化模型,然后在模糊线性多目标微分对策系统下对控制器的设计方法作出探讨.对一个1∶2对策问题做了仿真,其效果说明了解决问题方法的可行.     

A Bayesian analysis on the effect of multiple supply options in a quick response environment

In the apparel industry, vendors often suffer from high mismatches in supply and demand. To cope with this problem, they procure the same style product from different suppliers with different manufacturing costs. Especially in the quick response environment, which allows vendors to monitor trends in customer demand and search for available suppliers through the electronic market, they have additional opportunities to improve their decision‐making. In this paper, we propose an analytical profit maximization model and develop efficient decision tools to help both the middle and lower level managers pursuing this strategy. Furthermore, we have shown how significantly the vendors' potential competitive edge can be improved by exploiting multiple supply options, even at the expense of high premium procurement costs for late orders. The effect is critical, especially in a highly competitive market, and it has important implications for the top managers. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

New product introduction against a predator: A bilevel mixed‐integer programming approach

We consider a scenario with two firms determining which products to develop and introduce to the market. In this problem, there exists a finite set of potential products and market segments. Each market segment has a preference list of products and will buy its most preferred product among those available. The firms play a Stackelberg game in which the leader firm first introduces a set of products, and the follower responds with its own set of products. The leader's goal is to maximize its profit subject to a product introduction budget, assuming that the follower will attempt to minimize the leader's profit using a budget of its own. We formulate this problem as a multistage integer program amenable to decomposition techniques. Using this formulation, we develop three variations of an exact mathematical programming method for solving the multistage problem, along with a family of heuristic procedures for estimating the follower solution. The efficacy of our approaches is demonstrated on randomly generated test instances. This article contributes to the operations research literature a multistage algorithm that directly addresses difficulties posed by degeneracy, and contributes to the product variety literature an exact optimization algorithm for a novel competitive product introduction problem. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

联合补充博弈的费用分摊

就一个仓库、多个零售商,对联合订货费用函数的模型进行分析,给出了一个求解最佳订货周期的多项式时间的算法,且算法的时间复杂性为O（nlogn）。利用文献[8]中的技巧,给出了该库存博弈的核。     

军事欺骗战法分析的数学方法-应用*

针对军事欺骗战法定量分析困难的问题,采用基于贝叶斯统计推断和博弈均衡分析的数学方法,在理论上为解决此难题提供了一种可行的方法.该方法首先定义基本概率矩阵,然后根据贝叶斯原理为交战双方构造用于统计推断的主观概率矩阵,并在由两个主观概率矩阵元素构成的偏序链与实施军事欺骗机会之间建立对应关系,再将此关系推广到基本概率矩阵,即是否存在实施军事欺骗的机会将由基本概率矩阵元素构成的偏序链决定.对理论成果的初步应用表明:通过分析由战场情报信息构成的基本概率矩阵的偏序链,可以科学地运用军事欺骗和反军事欺骗战法.