Joint pricing,assortment, and inventory decisions for a retailer's product line

Consider a set of product variants that are differentiated by some secondary attributes such as flavor, color, or size. The retailer's problem is to jointly determine the set of variants to include in her product line (“assortment”), together with their prices and inventory levels, so as to maximize her expected profit. We model the consumer choice process using a multinomial logit choice model and consider a newsvendor type inventory setting. We derive the structure of the optimal assortment for some important special cases, including the case of horizontally differentiated items, and propose a dominance relationship for the general case that simplifies the search for an optimal assortment. We also discuss structural properties of the optimal prices. Finally, motivated by our analytical results, we propose a heuristic solution procedure, which is shown to be quite effective through a numerical study. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

伊拉克战争对中东地区乃至世界军品贸易的影响

在分析了伊拉克战争对中东地区军品贸易影响的基础上,重点分析了其对世界军品贸易的深刻影响———加剧军备竞赛、刺激军工技术发展、引起军贸格局及产品结构发生变化、国际军控形势更加严峻。     

How not to pay for the war

As a result of allied subsidy and the influence of sunk costs, the marginal cost of the Gulf War to the US was reduced to negligible size. This result is at variance with the Olson‐Zeckhauser thesis that in an alliance “the small exploit the large.” A game theoretic alternative explanation suggests that the relation between allies resembles the game of Chicken, successfully played by the US. The ability to shift the marginal costs of war in the short term raises questions about the possible underestimation of long term effects.     

NATO BENEFITS,BURDENS AND BORDERS: COMMENT

This note refutes criticism raised by Solomon about past tests used to ascertain the concordance between NATO benefits and burdens. In so doing, a case is made for keeping the benefit proxy based on exposed borders. Moreover, a truer sensitivity analysis than that offered by Solomon is suggested.     

Spatial pricing and product allocation in online retailing

Spatial pricing means a retailer price discriminates its customers based on their geographic locations. In this article, we study how an online retailer should jointly allocate multiple products and facilitate spatial price discrimination to maximize profits. When deciding between a centralized product allocation ((i.e., different products are allocated to the same fulfillment center) and decentralized product allocation (ie, different products are allocated to different fulfillment centers), the retailer faces the tradeoff between shipment pooling (ie, shipping multiple products in one package), and demand localization (ie, stocking products to satisfy local demand) based on its understanding of customers' product valuations. In our basic model, we consider two widely used spatial pricing policies: free on board (FOB) pricing that charges each customer the exact amount of shipping cost, and uniform delivered (UD) pricing that provides free shipping. We propose a stylized model and find that centralized product allocation is preferred when demand localization effect is relatively low or shipment pooling benefit is relatively high under both spatial pricing policies. Moreover, centralized product allocation is more preferred under the FOB pricing which encourages the purchase of virtual bundles of multiple products. Furthermore, we respectively extend the UD and FOB pricing policies to flat rate shipping (ie, the firm charges a constant shipping fee for each purchase), and linear rate shipping (ie, the firm sets the shipping fee as a fixed proportion of firm's actual fulfillment costs). While similar observations from the basic model still hold, we find the firm can improve its profit by sharing the fulfillment cost with its customers via the flat rate or linear rate shipping fee structure.     

Pricing and capacity allocation strategies: Implications for manufacturers with product sharing

Emerging sharing modes, like the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sharing of Uber and the business-to-consumer (B2C) sharing of GoFun, have considerably affected the retailing markets of traditional manufacturers, who are motivated to consider product sharing when making pricing and capacity decisions, particularly electric car manufacturers with limited capacity. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium pricing for a capacity-constrained manufacturer under various sharing modes and further analyze the impact of capacity constraint on the manufacturer's sharing mode selection as well as equilibrium outcomes. We find that manufacturers with low-cost products prefer B2C sharing while those with high-cost products prefer C2C sharing except when the sharing price is moderate. However, limited capacity motivates manufacturers to enter into the B2C sharing under a relatively low sharing price, and raise the total usage level by sharing high-cost products. We also show that the equilibrium capacity allocated to the sharing market with low-cost products first increases and then decreases. Finally, we find that sharing low-cost products with a high limited capacity leads to a lower retail price under B2C sharing, which creates a win-win situation for both the manufacturer and consumers. However, sharing high-cost products with a low limited capacity creates a win-lose situation for them.     

卫星导航接收机鉴相器有限字长效应研究

卫星导航接收机跟踪信号的能力取决于锁相环的跟踪精度,相位鉴别器在锁相环设计中具有重要地位。针对点积鉴相器和二象限反正切鉴相器在输入信号有限字长效应下,对鉴相器性能的影响问题,建立了鉴相器有限字长误差模型。通过理论推导输入信号的统计特性,计算得到鉴相器输入信号均值和方差表达式,并分析了有限字长对鉴相器的均值和方差、收敛区间和鉴别增益的影响情况。由理论和仿真验证,得出了鉴相器在输入信号有效位数3比特以上时,对环路跟踪精度没有影响的结论。     

栅格地理数据并行格式转换引擎

如今大规模地理数据正在社会各个部门和组织中迅速积累,但是由于部门利益和历史沿袭等原因,大规模地理数据共享仍然极具挑战,相应共享技术需求仍然极其旺盛。作为地理数据共享的基础方式之一,传统单机地理数据格式转换技术,一方面受限于磁盘读写及带宽瓶颈,另一方面面对日趋庞大的数据规模,已很难满足实际应用需求。因此提出一种针对栅格地理数据的并行格式转换引擎,采用高性能计算集群环境支持大规模栅格地理数据转换共享,大幅降低了大规模栅格地理数据转换过程的时间成本。栅格地理数据并行格式转换引擎采用基于公共接口的设计理念,框架灵活、具有良好的扩展性,支持地理数据格式的读写自定义以及新数据格式添加,能够实现接入数据格式间的任意两两转换。为验证引擎框架及其处理效率,在Lustre并行集群环境下以格网数据交换格式(国家地理空间数据交换格式)向常见栅格地理格式的转换为示例进行了测试实验。结果表明,栅格地理数据并行格式转换引擎能够在8个节点Lustre集群中达到7.54的良好并行加速比。     

Pragmatism over principle: US intervention and burden shifting in Somalia, 1992–1993

ABSTRACT

The conventional wisdom about the 1992 US intervention in Somalia is that it was a quintessentially humanitarian mission pushed by President George H. W. Bush. This article challenges that interpretation, drawing on newly declassified documents. The Somalia intervention, I argue, was largely a pragmatic response to concerns held by the US military. In late 1992, as the small UN mission in Somalia was collapsing, senior American generals worried about being drawn into the resulting vacuum. Hence they reluctantly recommended a robust US intervention, in the expectation that this would allow the UN to assemble a larger peacekeeping force that would take over within months. The intervention ultimately failed, but the military learned useful lessons from this experience on how to achieve smoother UN handoffs in the future and thus effectively shift longer-term stabilisation burdens to the international community.