the effect of unions on productivity u s surface mining of coal the purpose of this paper is to compare the abilities of two competing analytical techniques mathematical programming and statistical regression to shed light on the union nonunion productivity differential in u s surface coal mining the programming approach has the virtues of being nonparametric and thus extremely flexible and of being able to provide a decomposition of productivity differentials into three components differences in technical efficiency differences in scale efficiency and differences in congestion identification of these three components provides an aid to management in its search for the sources of and remedies for productivity gaps the econometric approach on the other hand is neither flexible nor does it provide such a decomposition its chief virtue lies in the fact that being stochastic it allows for the presence of noise and measurement error that plagues most if not all empirical data thus the two approaches have complementary virtues the two techniques are used to investigate productivity in two samples of u s surface coal mines the programming approach finds a large and significant positive union nonunion productivity differential this differential is due primarily to greater congestion occurring in the smaller nonunion mines in one sample and to scale inefficiency in the smaller nonunion mines in the other sample the econometric analysis finds nearly the same union nonunion productivity differential but sheds no light on the composition of and thus the cure for the differential

perishable inventory theory a review this paper reviews the relevant literature on the problem of determining suitable ordering policies for both fixed life perishable inventory and inventory subject to continuous exponential decay we consider both deterministic and stochastic demand for single and multiple products both optimal and sub optimal order policies are discussed in addition a brief review of the application of these models to blood bank management is included the review concludes with a discussion of some of the interesting open research questions in the area

optimal pricing and return policies for perishable commodities this paper considers the pricing decision faced by a producer of a commodity with a short shelf or demand life a hierarchical model is developed and the results of the single period inventory model are used to examine possible pricing and return policies the paper shows that several such policies currently in effect are suboptimal these include those where the manufacturer offers retailers full credit for all unsold goods or where no returns of unsold goods are permitted the paper also demonstrates that a policy whereby a manufacturer offers retailers full credit for a partial return of goods may achieve channel coordination but that the optimal return allowance will be a function of retailer demand therefore such a policy cannot be optimal in a multi retailer environment it is proven however that a pricing and return policy in which a manufacturer offers retailers a partial credit for all unsold goods can achieve channel coordination in a multi retailer environment this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 2 pages 166 176 in 1985

periodic review and continuous ordering abstract many inventory control studies consider either continuous review and continuous ordering or periodic review and periodic ordering mixtures of the two are hardly ever studied however the model with periodic review and continuous ordering is highly relevant in practice as information on the actual inventory level is not always up to date while making ordering decisions this paper will therefore treat this model assuming zero fixed ordering costs and allowing for a non negative lead time and a general demand process we first consider a one period decision problem without salvage cost for inventory remaining at the end of the period in this setting we derive a base line optimal order path described by a simple newsvendor solution with safety stocks increasing towards the end of a review period we then show that for the general multi period problem the optimal policy in a period is to first arrive at this path by not ordering until the excess buffer stock from the previous review period is depleted then follow the path by continuous ordering and stop ordering towards the end to limit excess stocks for the next review period an important managerial insight is that typically no order should be placed at a review moment although this may seem intuitive and is also the standard assumption in periodic review models we illustrate that adhering to the optimal ordering path instead can lead to cost reductions of 30 60 percent compared to pure periodic ordering

pricing and lot sizing polices for perishable goods when the demand depends on selling price displayed stocks and expiration date abstract price is a major factor on the demand based on marketing and economic theory in addition the demand for perishable products also depends on its freshness moreover it is a well known fact that increasing stock display e g fresh fruits vegetables baked goods may encourage consumers to purchase more this paper first proposes an inventory model that stipulates the demand explicitly in a multivariate function of price freshness and displayed stocks it may be profitable to have a closeout sale at a markdown price and always keep on hand displayed stocks fresh and plentiful if the demand is freshness and stock dependent hence the traditional assumption of zero ending inventories is relaxed to a non zero ending inventory as a result the objective is to determine three decision variables i e unit price cycle time and ending inventory level in order to maximize the total profit then it is demonstrated that the total profit is strictly pseudo concave in those three decision variables which reduces the search for solutions to a unique local maximum finally numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results and to highlight managerial insights are presented

an optimization approach for managing fresh food quality throughout the supply chain one of the most challenging tasks in today s food industry is controlling the product quality throughout the food supply chain in this paper we integrate food quality in decision making on production and distribution in a food supply chain we provide a methodology to model food quality degradation in such a way that it can be integrated in a mixed integer linear programming model used for production and distribution planning the resulting model is applied in an illustrative case study and can be used to design and operate food distribution systems using both food quality and cost criteria

financial factors and investment in belgium france germany and the united kingdom a comparison using company panel data we construct company panel data sets for manufacturing firms in belgium france germany and the united kingdom covering the period 1978 1989 these data sets are used to estimate empirical investment equations and to investigate the role played by financial factors in each country a robust finding is that cash flow and profits terms appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more significant in the united kingdom than in the three continental european countries this is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on investment may be relatively severe in the more market oriented u k financial system

an milp approximation for ordering perishable products with non stationary demand and service level constraints abstract we study the practical production planning problem of a food producer facing a non stationary erratic demand for a perishable product with a fixed life time in meeting the uncertain demand the food producer uses a fifo issuing policy the food producer aims at meeting a certain service level at lowest cost every production run a setup cost is incurred moreover the producer has to deal with unit production cost unit holding cost and unit cost of waste the production plan for a finite time horizon specifies in which periods to produce and how much we formulate this single item single echelon production planning problem as a stochastic programming model with a chance constraint we show that an approximate solution can be provided by an milp model the generated plan simultaneously specifies the periods to produce and the corresponding order up to levels the order up to level for each period is corrected for the expected waste by explicitly considering for every period the expected age distribution of the products in stock the model assumes zero lead time and backlogging of shortages the viability of the approach is illustrated by numerical experiments simulation shows that in 96 4 of the periods the service level requirements are met with an error tolerance of 1

age based vs stock level control policies for a perishable inventory system abstract in this study we investigate the impact of modified lotsize reorder control policy for perishables which bases replenishment decisions on both the inventory level and the remaining lifetimes of items in stock we derive the expressions for the key operating characteristics of a lost sales perishable inventory model operating under the proposed age based policy and examine the sensitivity of the optimal policy parameters with respect to various system parameters we compare the performance of the suggested policy to that of the classical q r type policy through a numerical study over a wide range of system parameters our findings indicate that the age based policy is superior to the stock level policy for slow moving perishable inventory systems with high service levels

optimal control of a single stage production system subject to random process shifts we consider a single stage production system with poisson demand and exponential processing times after producing a good item the production process can shift to an out of control state with a given probability and start producing bad items the state of the process is known only when the next stage or customer receives the item once an out of control process is detected process correction is instantaneous customers arriving to an empty system get backlogged in this framework we examine fifo first in first out and lifo last in first out issuing policies the objective is to minimize the total expected discounted or average costs over an infinite time horizon we characterize the structure of the optimal production policy for fifo and lifo show that lifo is better than fifo and in general better than a large class of issuing policies a numerical example illustrates that savings up to 20 percent can be obtained from using lifo over fifo we also derive conditions under which maintaining z

a new age based replenishment policy for supply chain inventory optimization of highly perishable products abstract a simulation optimization framework is proposed for supply chain inventory management of highly perishable products a new replenishment policy based on old inventory ratio is developed hence called oir policy it is an age based policy using only partial age information to measure the freshness of the entire inventory the efficiency of the new policy is evaluated in detail for a single vendor multi buyer platelet with a limited shelf life of 5 days supply chain the inventory objective is to minimize the expected system outdate rate under a predetermined maximal allowable shortage level the new oir policy is compared with two existing order up to policies one is the order up to policy without age consideration the other one is the ewa policy developed by broekmeulen and van donselaar 2009 the three policies are compared under both decentralized and centralized controls for different levels of the fillrate constraint the computational results show that adopting centralized control over the whole platelet supply chain greatly helps in reducing the system expected outdate rate from 19 6 down to 1 04 on average while keeping sufficiently high fill rate at each entity the two policies with age consideration are generally better than the policy without age consideration under both control strategies this is particularly true for decentralized control the new oir policy is recommended because it is the best among all three consistently yielding good results in all cases studied

replenishment and pricing policy for deteriorating items taking into account the time value of money abstract a deteriorating inventory model taking into account the time value of money is developed for a deterministic inventory system with price dependent demand this study applies the discounted cash flows dcf approach for problem analysis a heuristic approach is presented to derive the near optimal replenishment and pricing policy that tries to maximize the total net present value profit a numerical example is implemented to illustrate the theory

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

optimal discounting and replenishment policies for perishable products abstract we consider a retailer selling a perishable product with short shelf life and uncertain demand facing these key decisions a whether to discount old er items b how much discount to offer and c what should be the replenishment policy in order to better understand the impact of consumer behavior and shelf life on these decisions we consider four models in model a the product has a shelf life of two periods and the retailer decides whether or not to offer a discount the amount of discount is exogenous and assumed to be large enough so that all the customers prefer the old product to the new one when a discount is offered based on several numerical examples we find that a threshold discounting policy in which a discount is offered if and only if the inventory of old product is below a threshold is optimal in model b the retailer also decides how much discount to offer model c extends model b and considers a new pool of customers who are willing to purchase from the retailer when a discount is offered in both models b and c the product has a shelf life of two periods while model d explores what happens with longer shelf life we analyze and compare these models to present different managerial insights

an order level lot size inventory model with inventory level dependent demand and deterioration abstract many inventory models have been developed for various deteriorating items with constant demand rate it is a common experience that for perishable consumer goods the age of inventory has a negative impact on the demand due to the loss of consumer confidence on such product consumers tend to keep off perishable items which have reached closer to their expiry dates this paper describes an inventory model in which the demand is considered as a composite function consisting of a constant component and a variable component which is proportional to the inventory level in the periods when there is a positive inventory buildup the rate of production is considered finite and the decay rate as exponential the total cost function is composed of four cost components of all phases of the cycle backorder replenishment inventory buildup inventory depletion and shortage this cost function is later reduced to a two variable function using boundary relations to determine iteratively the set of values of the variables that resulted in minimum cost per cycle the optimum lot size and order level were then obtained with relations established previously results are demonstrated for an instance of the model

dynamic economic lot size model with perishable inventory this paper considers an economic lot size els model for perishable products where an inventory stock s deterioration rate and its carrying cost in each period depend on the age of the stock we discuss situations where the traditional els models are not applicable and propose a new model with general concave production and inventory cost functions we explore the structural properties of the optimal solutions and use them to develop a dynamic programming algorithm which solves the problem in polynomial time we also consider special cases of the general model which are solvable with reduced computational complexities

a new class of stock level dependent ordering policies for perishables with a short maximum shelf life many perishables such as fresh food and blood platelet concentrates are characterized by a short maximum shelf life as demand is often highly uncertain the outdating and shortages figures can be very high especially when frequent replenishment is not possible or inefficient due to fixed ordering cost we present a new class of stock level dependent ordering policies the s s q q policy which is a periodic review s s policy with the order quantity restricted by a minimum q and maximum q optimal weekday dependent parameter values are derived by dynamic programming and simulation the s s q q policy performs nearly optimal and improves the s s policies in many cases by 4 25

simulation study of the price differentiation effect in a stochastic deteriorating inventory with heterogeneous consumers freshness sensitivity a fixed price policy regardless of expiration date may result in unsold inventory and sales loss price reduction over time as the expiration date approaches motivates customers to purchase all items including the ones that are left with only a short interval until their expiration we conduct a discrete event simulation that captures the main characteristics of this phenomenon results show that a moderate differentiation of price increases profits by 6 a larger differentiation reduces profits profits are the highest for freshness oriented customers a fixed price policy is preferred in an environment of large variance and expected near term expirations

approximation algorithms for perishable inventory systems we develop the first approximation algorithms with worst case performance guarantees for periodic review perishable inventory systems with general product lifetime for both backlogging and lost sales models the demand process can be nonstationary and correlated over time capturing such features as demand seasonality and forecast updates the optimal control policy for such systems is notoriously complicated thus finding effective heuristic policies is of practical importance in this paper we construct a computationally efficient inventory control policy called the proportional balancing policy for systems with an arbitrarily correlated demand process and show that it has a worst case performance guarantee less than 3 in addition when the demands are independent and stochastically nondecreasing over time we propose another policy called the dual balancing policy which admits a worst case performance guarantee of 2 we demonstrate through an extensive numerical study that both policies perform consistently close to optimal

an s 1 s inventory system with emergency orders in this paper we develop an approximate model of an inventory control system in which there exist two options for resupply with one having a shorter lead time we assume that demand and the fixed ordering costs are small relative to the holding cost so that a one for one ordering policy is appropriate we consider a policy for placing emergency orders that uses information about the age of outstanding orders we derive the steady state behavior of this policy and present some computational results

managing blood donations with marketing blood banks rely on marketing to encourage donors to give blood many if not most blood banks in the united states are community based not for profit organizations with limited marketing budgets as a result blood banks increasingly use novel and inexpensive online media i e paid owned and earned poe media in their marketing efforts we propose a dynamic model to help blood bank marketing managers understand how blood donations can be managed via online poe media we analytically characterize the optimal forward looking paid media strategies taking into account the asymmetric costs related to shortage and excess of blood as well as the possibility of a cost free target donation zone we detail new advertising resource allocation rules for blood banks and show when traditional allocation recommendations do not apply additionally we discover that under certain circumstances owned earned media activities hurt the blood bank s performance despite being predominantly free we validate our analytical model by using daily donation data from a community based blood bank and measure the effects of poe media activities on the level of blood donated

firm growth and liquidity constraints a dynamic analysis using a large unbalanced panel data set of portuguese manufacturing firms surviving over the period from 1990 to 2001 the purpose of this paper is to examine whether liquidity constraints faced by business firms affect firm growth we use a gmm system to estimate a dynamic panel data model of firm growth that incorporates cash flow as a measure of liquidity constraints and persistence of growth the model is estimated for all size classes including micro firms our findings reveal that smaller and younger firms have higher growth cash flow sensitivities than larger and more mature firms this is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on firm growth may be relatively more severe for small and young firms nevertheless the same finding can be interpreted in a different way if we consider the more recent literature which interpret the higher investment cash flow sensitivity of younger and smaller firm in absence of financial market imperfection as the outcome of these firms reaction to the fact that realisation of their cash flows reveals them the direction to go in presence of uncertainty of their growth prospect besides firms that were small and young at the beginning of the sample period exhibited more persistent growth than those that were large and old finally these results have significant policy implications

the economic lot sizing problem with perishable items and consumption order preference abstract we consider the economic lot sizing problem with perishable items els pi where each item has a deterministic expiration date although all items in stock are equivalent regardless of procurement or expiration date we allow for an allocation mechanism that defines an order in which the items are allocated to the consumers in particular we consider the following allocation mechanisms first expiration first out fefo last expiration first out lefo first in first out fifo and last in first out lifo we show that the els pi can be solved in polynomial time under all four allocation mechanisms in case of no procurement capacities this result still holds in case of time invariant procurement capacities under the fifo and lefo allocation mechanisms but the problem becomes np hard under the fefo and lifo allocation mechanisms

stochastic data envelopment analysis a review abstract this paper provides a review of stochastic data envelopment analysis dea we discuss extensions of deterministic dea in three directions i deviations from the deterministic frontier are modeled as stochastic variables ii random noise in terms of measurement errors sample noise and specification errors is made an integral part of the model and iii the frontier is stochastic as is the underlying production possibility set pps stochastic dea utilizes non parametric convex or conical hull reference technologies based upon axioms from production theory accompanied by a statistical foundation in terms of axioms from statistics or distributional assumptions the approaches allow for an estimation of stochastic inefficiency compared to a deterministic or a stochastic pps and for statistical inference while maintaining an axiomatic foundation focus is on bridges and differences between approaches within the field of stochastic dea including semi parametric stochastic frontier analysis sfa and chance constrained dea ccdea we argue that statistical inference based upon homogenous bootstrapping in contrast to a management science approach imposes a restrictive structure on inefficiency which may not facilitate the communication of results of the analysis to decision makers semi parametric sfa and ccdea differ w r t the modeling of noise and stochastic inefficiency the two approaches are in spite of the inherent differences shown to be complements in the sense that the stochastic ppss obtained by the two approaches share basic similarities in the case of one output and multiple inputs recent contributions related to i disentangling of random noise and random inefficiency and ii obtaining smooth shape constrained estimators of the frontier are discussed

time series analysis of deregulatory dynamics and technical efficiency the case of the u s airline industry as markets worldwide become less regulated it becomes increasingly possible and timely to establish the presence of an empirical relationship between technical efficiency and market forces compelling agents to economize this article taking an innovative approach to test the hypothesis that competitive pressure enhances efficiency constructs a methodology to examine time series of technical efficiency indices for cointegration and convergence a panel of u s airlines observed quarterly between 1970 and 1990 is used as a case study cointegration results are suggestive of long run relationships between carriers furthermore convergence tests document less dispersion in firm performance over time

blood platelet inventory management with protection levels abstract we consider a discrete time inventory system for a perishable product where demand exists for product of different ages an example of such a product is blood platelets in addition to the classical costs for inventory holding outdating and shortage our model includes substitution mismatch costs incurred when a demand for a certain aged item is satisfied by a different aged item we propose a simple inventory replenishment and allocation heuristic to minimize the expected total cost over an infinite time horizon in our heuristic inventory of the newest items is replenished in fixed quantities and the newest items are protected for future use by limiting some substitutions when making allocation decisions according to a critical level policy we model our problem as a markov decision process mdp derive the costs of our heuristic policy and computationally compare this policy to extant near optimal policies in the literature our extensive computational study shows that our policy leads to superior performance compared to existing heuristics in the literature particularly when supplies are limited

blood platelet production with breaks optimization by sdp and simulation abstract the production and inventory management of blood products at blood banks and hospitals is a problem of general human interest as a shortage may put lives at risk shortages are to be kept to a minimum as the supply is voluntary and costly any spill of unused blood products is also to be minimized blood platelets thrombocytes which are the most expensive and perishable blood product have the complication of a limited shelf life of only 5 7 days a general figure in the western world the usa and western europe for the spill of blood platelets is in the order of 15 20 a combined new approach is therefore presented which combines stochastic dynamic programming sdp and simulation to provide i practical simple order up to rules that are nearly optimal ii formal theoretical support the approach has been applied to a dutch regional blood bank numerical results show a significant reduction of the figures from 1 to 1 for shortages 20 to 1 for spill a practical question for blood bank managers that still remains is how to anticipate irregular production breaks like at easter and christmas the present paper therefore will extend the combined sdp simulation approach to include such breaks the main findings are also for these breaks a simple order up to rule remains to be nearly optimal also for these breaks the outdating and shortages can be kept less than 1 the stationary periods with production and the non stationary breaks without can be integrated the approach thus seems suitable for practical implementation

blood inventory management an overview of theory and practice blood inventory management has attracted significant interest from the operations research profession during the last 15 years a number of methodological contributions have been made in the areas of inventory theory and combinatoric optimization that can be of use to other products or systems these contributions include the development of exact and approximate ordering and issuing policies for an inventory system the analysis of lifo or multi product systems and various forms of distribution scheduling in addition many of these results have been implemented either as decision rules for efficient blood management in a hospital or as decision support systems for hierarchical planning in a regional blood center in this paper we attempt a review of the recent operations research contributions to blood inventory management theory and practice whereas many problems have been solved others remain open and new ones keep being created with advances in medical technology and practices our approach is not to present an exhaustive review of all the literature in the field but rather to address several important issues from a unified perspective of theory and practice and point out new areas for further research

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

sme credit constraints in asia s rising economic star fresh empirical evidence from vietnam this study provides a fresh look at the sme sector s economic backbone vis a vis credit constraint dichotomy in vietnam asia s rising economic star the study uses data from the survey of manufactu

review of inventory systems with deterioration since 2001 abstract this paper presents an up to date review of the advances made in the field of inventory control of perishable items deteriorating inventory the last extensive review on this topic dates back to 2001 goyal s k and giri b c recent trends in modeling of deteriorating inventory european journal of operational research 134 1 16 since then over two hundred articles on this subject have been published in the major journals on inventory control indicating the need for a new review we use the classification of goyal and giri based on shelf life characteristics and demand characteristics contributions are highlighted by discussing main system characteristics including price discounts backordering or lost sales single or multiple items one or two warehouses single or multi echelon average cost or discounted cash flow and payment delay

the newsvendor problem in a global market optimal centralized and decentralized control policies for a two market stochastic inventory system the global markets of today offer to the style goods producer more selling opportunities and pose new challenges in production planning and coordination from a production management standpoint the opportunity to exploit the difference in timing of the selling season of geographically dispersed markets for style goods is important for improving the firm s profitability in this paper we examine the above issue with an insightful model of a producer of style goods selling the goods to two markets a primary and a secondary market with nonoverlapping selling seasons we refer to this problem as the global newsvendor problem for the above two market stochastic inventory systems we first develop optimal centralized control policies then we demonstrate the suboptimality of decentralized production control policies with the production centers at each market treated as independent profit centers and a constant transfer price being used to coordinate their production we propose as an effective alternative a decentralized production control structure with a nonlinear pricing scheme for production coordination among centers administered through an intermediate organizational unit in our modeling we explicitly consider the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the production planning decisions

eoq models for continuously deteriorating products using linear and exponential penalty costs abstract we present eoq models for perishable products which consider continuous deterioration of the utility of a product and introduce an exponential penalty cost function as a measurement of the utility deterioration the approach proposed is simple and can be used to obtain easily the closed forms of the economic order quantities which have not previously been derived these forms describe the effect of the penalty cost clearly and are a natural extension of economic order quantities for non perishable products our results are shown to be consistent with reported eoq models with exponential decay but derived more elaborately our approach has the added advantage that it can be easily extended to the economic lot scheduling problem for multi item perishable products

integrated supply chain management for perishable products dynamics and oligopolistic competition perspectives with application to pharmaceuticals abstract we propose an integrated supply chain management framework that allows us to explicitly consider the impact of product perishability on a broad scale that includes manufacturers distribution centers wholesalers and demand markets the framework proposed herein also makes it possible to consider the oligopolistic competition across wholesalers that drives price and demand fluctuations furthermore the supply chain decision rules are derived from necessary conditions in the framework the inclusion of such salient features allows the framework to generate outcomes that suggest realistic managerial insights we provide a numerical example in which two multi national pharmaceutical firms producing a homogeneous medicinal drug and four oligopolistic wholesalers are considered

technological change technological catch up and capital deepening relative contributions to growth and convergence we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to 1 technological change shifts in the world production frontier 2 technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and 3 capital accumulation movement along the frontier the world production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections we analyze the evolution of the cross country distribution of labor productivity in terms of the tripartite decomposition finding that technological change is decidedly nonneutral and that both growth and bipolar international divergence are driven primarily by capital deepening jel o30 o47 d24

the application of queueing theory to continuous perishable inventory systems this paper develops two distinct models for studying inventory systems with continuous production and perishable items the perishable items have a deterministic usable life after which they must be outdated for each of the models analytical expressions derived from queueing theory are found for the steady state distribution of system inventory knowledge of this steady state behavior may be used for evaluation of system performance and for consideration of alternatives for improving system performance both models assume that inventory is replenished by a continuous production process the first model assuming continuous inventory units has poisson demand requests with the size of each request distributed as an exponential random variable the second model has poisson demand requests with all demands being for a single unit the analysis for both models exploits the similarity of the inventory system with a single server queueing system

order variability in perishable product supply chains abstract empirical research has shown that the degree of order variability in supply chains is significantly influenced by product and industry specific factors this paper analyzes the impact of perishability on order variability and the bullwhip effect in supply chains we decompose the ordering process of a retailer into a sales and an outdating process and quantify their short and long term variability and correlation we find differences to non perishable product supply chains driven by the impact of the inventory depletion policy stock out management and retailers service level requirement these three factors significantly affect the retailer s order variability and thus the decision making process and the profitability of the upstream supply stage for the majority of instances the perishable nature of a product results in the ordering process having a lower variability than the demand process only when inventory depletion is dominated by last in first out in high service level environments variability amplification can be observed we propose a dynamic ordering policy for the upstream supply stage taking into account negative correlation of retailer orders between periods this dynamic policy may lead to substantial performance improvements in a sensitivity analysis we investigate the impact of shelf life lead time and demand correlation

financial markets and wages we study a labor market equilibrium model in which flrms sign optimal long term contracts with workers firms that are flnancially constrained ofier an increasing wage proflle they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher wages once they become unconstrained and operate at a larger scale in equilibrium constrained flrms are on average smaller and pay lower wages in this way the model generates a positive relation between flrm size and wages using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy we show that the key dynamic properties of the model are supported by the data jel classiflcation g31 j31 e24

note an application of the eoq model with nonlinear holding cost to inventory management of perishables abstract in this note we consider a variation of the economic order quantity eoq model where cumulative holding cost is a nonlinear function of time this problem has been studied by weiss weiss h 1982 economic order quantity models with nonlinear holding costs european journal of operational research 9 56 60 and we here show how it is an approximation of the optimal order quantity for perishable goods such as milk and produce sold in small to medium size grocery stores where there are delivery surcharges due to infrequent ordering and managers frequently utilize markdowns to stabilize demand as the product s expiration date nears we show how the holding cost curve parameters can be estimated via a regression approach from the product s usual holding cost storage plus capital costs lifetime and markdown policy we show in a numerical study that the model provides significant improvement in cost vis a vis the classic eoq model with a median improvement of 40 this improvement is more significant for higher daily demand rate lower holding cost shorter lifetime and a markdown policy with steeper discounts

explaining the distribution of firm growth rates empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates we present clear cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data we explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited a theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity moreover using simulations we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete

hypercongestion in production correspondences an empirical exploration this empirical contribution reviews the rather limited existing literature measuring congestion in production it first compares current ways to measure congestion using nonparametric specifications of technologies in particular it focuses on the magnitude and incidence of the congestion detected in empirical studies using traditional radial efficiency measures thereafter it shows the limitations of this radial measurement and how alternative measurement schemes may reveal higher amounts of congestion then the new more general methodology of measuring s congestion is presented in particular we first present a numerical example to illustrate the way the s disposable technologies allow to capture more extreme forms of congestion by setting empirically determined upper bounds to the wasting of inputs then an empirical illustration is presented based on an existing sample of data a final section concludes

growth acquisition activity and firm size evidence from the united kingdom this paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between size growth and acquisition activity of quoted companies in the united kingdom the evidence is based on some two thousand companies and covers the period i960 76 there has been no detailed systematic study for this period the results suggest some revisions to generally accepted views in the area and they have certain implications for industrial and competition policy pursued in the u k and the factors affecting aggregate concentration the paper is arranged as follows section i considers the broader economic context for the study whilst section ii notes some a priori expectations regarding the relationship between size and growth and size and acquisition activity sections iii v present empirical evidence and the last section provides a summary and policy implications of the results

modeling an inventory routing problem for perishable products with environmental considerations and demand uncertainty the transition to sustainable food supply chain management has brought new key logistical aims such as reducing food waste and environmental impacts of operations in the supply chain besides the traditional cost minimization objective traditional assumptions of constant distribution costs between nodes unlimited product shelf life and deterministic demand used in the inventory routing problem irp literature restrict the usage of the proposed models in current food logistics systems from this point of view our interest in this study is to enhance the traditional models for the irp to make them more useful for the decision makers in food logistics management therefore we present a multi period irp model that includes truck load dependent and thus route dependent distribution costs for a comprehensive evaluation of co2 emission and fuel consumption perishability and a service level constraint for meeting uncertain demand a case study on the fresh tomato distribution operations of a supermarket chain shows the applicability of the model to a real life problem several variations of the model each differing with respect to the considered aspects are employed to present the benefits of including perishability and explicit fuel consumption concerns in the model the results suggest that the proposed integrated model can achieve significant savings in total cost while satisfying the service level requirements and thus offers better support to decision makers

productivity market selection and corporate growth comparative evidence across us and europe this paper analyses the patterns of market selection in manufacturing industries of france germany uk and usa we first disentangle the contribution to industry level productivity growth of within firm productivity changes and between firm reallocation of shares the evidence corroborates the notion that within firm learning prevails over market selection forces with larger firms driving such innovation and learning processes second we address the strength of selection by exploring to what extent firm growth rates are shaped by relative productivity levels as compared to variation thereof our key finding is that although changes in relative efficiency have a greater impact on growth than relative efficiency levels there is an overall weak relationship between productivity and growth and therefore a weak power of selection forces in all countries the results hold across firms of different size but we also find that selection bites more on smes

an economic ordering policy model for deteriorating items with time proportional demand abstract a t i s i inventory policy model for deteriorating items is presented in this paper the model is developed based on the assumptions that 1 demand rate is deterministic and linearly changes with time 2 deterioration rate is constant 3 planning horizon is finite and known and 4 replenishment periods are not equal the model is solved using a dynamic programming method the result is applicable to the case where the demand is either increasing or decreasing a numerical example is provided to illustrate the model and solution procedure

an approximation to the continuous review inventory model with perishable items and lead times a continuous review perishable inventory model based on approximations to the expected outdating the expected shortage quantity and the expected inventory level is developed to determine a best q r ordering policy under a positive order leadtime when the total expected average cost per unit time is minimized the approximation method is simple and verified by a comparison with the weiss model the results reveal that the mean absolute deviation from the optimal total expected average cost per unit time is only 0 58 this paper also compares the proposed model to the conventional model with no perishability a value is given to the item lifetime indicating when an approximate answer approaches closely to the conventional ordering policy finally a simulation model written in simscript ii 5 is used to validate the approximate results

inferring shortfall costs and integrating environmental costs into optimal production levels for an all you care to eat food service operation abstract this study examines how optimal food production policies at an all you care to eat aycte facility would change were life cycle cost estimates of embodied co2 included in the disposal costs associated with overproduction in an aim to study production planning possibilities in a situation that places increased emphasis on the environmental impacts of overproduction aycte operations exhibit a lack of revenue associated with each item served since there is no per item lost sales value incurred when demand exceeds supply accordingly the second objective of this research is to present a novel method for estimating shortfall costs in a setting with no marginal revenue per satisfied unit of demand we examine empirical data from aycte operations at the university of missouri s campus dining services cds to infer the per item shortfall costs that are implied by cds management s historical production decisions consistent with cds management s stated aversion to shortfalls we estimate shortfall values which are between 1 6 and 2 7 times larger than the procurement cost and between 30 and over 100 times larger than the disposal cost utilizing published estimates of life cycle co2 and the social cost of carbon we identify a per portion environmental cost we incorporate the environmental costs associated with wasted overproduction and the inferred shortfall cost estimates into a newsvendor model formulation to identify new optimal production levels illustrating this approach with application to a set of food items served by cds we find that optimal production levels are decreased significantly 18 25 for food items with high environmental impacts such as beef and reduced less for foods with less embodied co2

a theory of financing constraints and firm dynamics there is widespread evidence supporting the conjecture that borrowing constraints have important implications for firm growth and survival in this paper we model a multiperiod borrowing lending relationship with asymmetric information we show that borrowing constraints emerge as a feature of the optimal long term lending contract and that such constraints relax as the value of the borrower s claim to future cash flows increases we also show that the optimal contract has interesting implications for firm dynamics in agreement with the empirical evidence as age and size increase mean and variance of growth decrease and firm survival increases

asymmetric competition risk and return distribution abstract we propose a parsimonious statistical model of firm competition where structural differences in the strength of competitive pressure and the magnitude of return fluctuations above and below the system wide benchmark translate into a skewed subbotin or asymmetric exponential power aep distribution of returns to capital empirical evidence from us data illustrates that the aep distribution compares favorably to popular alternative models such as the symmetric or asymmetric laplace density in terms of goodness of fit when entry and exit dynamics of markets are taken into account

analysis of a sampling control scheme for a perishable inventory system we consider an inventory system in which both the arrival of items and the demand for those items are poisson processes the stored items have two phases of shelf life if the item has not been taken by a demand during the first phase it is inspected with probability q it is removed and with probability p 1 q it is transferred to the second phase the blood bank model inspired this study we compute ergodic limits for the number of items in the system the lost demands and the two types of outdating

replenishment delays for expensive slow moving items traditional single item inventory control policies operating under continuous review call for the immediate placement of a replenishment order each time a demand causes the inventory position to drop to or below the order point in an environment where lead times are small relative to the average time between demands and holding costs are large relative to other inventory costs it may be more economical to delay ordering to achieve holding cost savings with little additional risk or cost of shortages this paper introduces the concept of delayed replenishment orders for expensive items subject to intermittent unit sized demands the inventory system modeled is one with complete backlogging constant lead times arbitrary inter demand distributions linear carrying costs and emergency handling of shortages at a premium cost results are given for the optimal delay for inter demand distributions with increasing failure rates specific expressions for the optimal delay are given for several commonly used inter demand distributions

operating characteristics of the s 1 s inventory system with partial backorders and constant resupply times in this paper we consider an s 1 s inventory system with poisson demand and constant resupply times an arriving customer facing stockout will either backorder or withdraw its order expressions describing steady state operating characteristics of the system and the expected total cost rate are developed furthermore the behavior of the expected total cost rate as the function of the relevant parameters is explored

the economies of massed reserves the economy of massed reserves first mentioned by e a g robinson 1958 pp 26 27 is now firmly established in the industrial organization literature as an example of a potential plant level scale economy the massing of reserves results in a savings in the proportion of required reserves to expected output as the scale of a facility increases examples of such reserves are bank tellers specialized tools and equipment repairmen inventories spare parts and checkout lines the potential economies from massing reserves are dependent on the underlying stochastic processes governing the supply and or demand of the service provided theoretical justification for the economies of massed reserves has usually been based on an appeal to the law of large numbers for example donald hay and derek morris wrote the law of large numbers makes the number of breakdowns more predictable in a plant using a large number of machines so that the number of stand by maintenance staff need not be increased in proportion to size 1979 p 44 this paper demonstrates that the law of large numbers does not provide a theoretical explanation of massed reserves scale economies instead it is shown that the expected economies of massed reserves can be calculated from the steady state properties of well known queuing models queuing models apply to any case where a servicing input is held in reserve to cope with the stochastic nature of the market or production process in addition a method for quantifying the expected economies of queuing processes is developed the magnitude of these expected economies is shown to be significant and calculable for example the expected economies inherent in a widely applied queuing model are shown to exceed 23 percent in some cases section i establishes the irrelevance of the law of large numbers as a theory of scale economies section ii provides a formal method for determining the scale economies inherent in the most often mentioned massed reserves example machine repair section iii shows that the same method can be used to calculate scale economies for the remaining massed reserves examples specialized repair tools and equipment checkout counter clerks bank tellers and other service personnel capacity and inventories and spare parts in addition it is demonstrated that the same method can be used to calculate scale economies for some multiproduct operations

eoq models for perishable items under stock dependent selling rate this paper presents inventory models for perishable items with stock dependent selling rate the selling rate is assumed to be a function of current inventory level and rate of deterioration is taken to be constant under instantaneous replenishment with zero lead time the model incorporates aspects such as complete partial and no backlogging eoq is determined for maximizing the total profit in each of the situations the models developed are illustrated through numerical examples and sensitivity analysis is reported

causes and effects of financing constraints at the firm level this paper focuses on the empirical assessment of determinants and effects of financing constraints at the firm level using a standard model of credit rationing based on asymmetric information firm age and size are found to be factors which should influence the probability of financing constraints improving business conditions strengthen the degree of informational asymmetry a unique panel of firm data for germany including direct information on financing constraints is used for the econometric analysis firms size and improving business conditions are found to have a significant effect furthermore a significant impact on investment and r d expenditures cannot be rejected

do liquidity constraints matter in explaining firm size and growth some evidence from the italian manufacturing industry the paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of italian manufacturing firms we run standard panel data gibrat regressions suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints proxied by cash flow scaled by firm sales moreover we characterize the statistical properties of fi rms size growth age and scaled cashflow distributions pooled data show that i liquidity constraints engender a negative statistically significant effect on growth once one controls for size ii smaller firms grow more and experience more volatile growth patterns after controlling for liquidity constraints iii the stronger liquidity constraints the more size negatively affects firm growth we find that pooled size distributions depart from log normality and growth rates are well approximated by fat tailed tent shaped laplace densities we also study the evolution of growth size distributions over time our exercises suggest that the strong negative impact of liquidity constraints on firm growth which was present in the pooled sample becomes ambiguous when one disaggregates across years finally firms who were young and strongly liquidity constrained at the beginning of the sample period grew persistently more than those who were old and weakly liquidity constrained

the role of demographics in small business loan pricing demographic change influences the structure of the entrepreneurially active population which may affect credit risk and financing conditions of small firms using bank internal data of small business loans in germany we find that the lending relationship plays a larger role for loan prices than demographics loan rates decrease with soft information gained through longer loan processing time and a larger number of accounts at the same bank they increase with hard information about repayment arrears and reminders late payments have the largest influence on loan prices older entrepreneurs do not seem to be discriminated rather the younger have to pay more because their loans and businesses are smaller and they lack liquidity to pay in time marital status and population density of the business district do not matter this is good news for aging economies with a rising share of elderly and singles and growing disparities between peripheral and agglomerated regions

optimal lending contracts and firm dynamics we develop a general model of lending in the presence of endogenous borrowing constraints borrowing constraints arise because borrowers face limited liability and debt repayment cannot be perfectly enforced in the model the dynamics of debt are closely linked with the dynamics of borrowing constraints in fact borrowing constraints must satisfy a dynamic consistency requirement the value of outstanding debt restricts current access to short term capital but is itself determined by future access to credit this dynamic consistency is not guaranteed in models of exogenous borrowing constraints where the ability to raise short term capital is limited by some prespecified function of debt we characterize the optimal default free contract which minimizes borrowing constraints at all histories and derive implications for firm growth survival leverage and debt maturity the model is qualitatively consistent with stylized facts on the growth and survival of firms comparative statics with respect to technology and default constraints are derived borrowing constraints are an important determinant of firm growth and survival 1 such constraints may arise in connection to the financing of investment opportunities faced by firms or temporary liquidity needs such as those required to survive a recession this paper develops a theory of endogenous borrowing constraints and studies its implications for firm dynamics in our model debt is constrained by the firm s limited liability and option to default a lending contract specifies an initial loan size future financing and a repayment schedule the choice of these variables in turn determines future growth the firm s future borrowing capacity and its ability and willingness to repay hence borrowing constraints and firm dynamics are jointly determined we study this dynamic design problem our model builds on thomas and worral s 1994 model of foreign direct investment at time zero a risk neutral borrower firm or entrepreneur has a project which requires a fixed initial set up cost every period the project yields revenues that increase with the amount of 1 there is considerable evidence suggesting that financing constraints are important determinants of firm dynamics gertler and gilchrist 1994 argue that liquidity constraints may explain why small manufacturing firms respond more to a tightening of monetary policy than do larger manufacturing firms perez quiros and timmermann 2000 show that in recessions smaller firms are more sensitive to the worsening of credit market conditions as measured by higher interest rates and default premia evans and jovanovic 1989 show that the liquidity constraints are essential in the decision to become an entrepreneur fazzari hubbard and petersen 1988 among others view financial constraints as an explanation for the dynamic behaviour of aggregate investment and cabral and mata 1996 are able to fit reasonably well the size distribution of portuguese manufacturing firms by estimating a simple model of financing constraints for surveys see hubbard 1998 and stein 2003

working capital and fixed investment new evidence on financing constraints this article presents new tests for finance constraints on investment by emphasizing the often neglected role of working capital as both a use and a source of funds the coefficient of endogenous working capital investment is negative in a fixed investment regression as expected if working capital competes with fixed investment for a limited pool of finance this finding addresses a criticism of previous research on finance constraints that cash flows may simply proxy shifts in investment demand in addition previous studies may have underestimated the impact of finance constraints on growth and investment because firms smooth fixed investment in the short run with working capital

an optimal procurement policy for items with an inventory level dependent demand rate and fixed lifetime abstract this paper investigates an optimal procurement policy for items with an inventory level dependent demand rate and fixed lifetime the demand rate is assumed to be a function of current inventory level and each unit has its fixed expiry date so any units which remain unused by their expiry date are considered outdated and must be disposed of for the system presented a mathematical model and solution methodology were developed sensitivity of the decision variables to changes in the parameter values is examined and future research needs are discussed in brief

optimal production planning utilizing leftovers for an all you care to eat food service operation abstract food service operations in an all you care to eat environment need to consider two conflicting objectives a desire to reduce overproduction food waste and its corresponding environmental impacts and an aversion to shortfalls in which some customer demands go unsatisfied a particular challenge in such buffet style operations is the absence of any lost marginal revenue associated with lost sales that can be used to measure the shortfall cost complicating any attempt to determine a minimum cost solution this research presents a multi criteria optimization approach to identify the efficient frontier of points lying between the minimum waste and minimum shortfall solutions in particular we identify optimal production adjustments relative to demand forecasts demand thresholds for utilization of leftovers and percentages of demand to be satisfied by leftovers considering two alternative metrics for overproduction waste mass and greenhouse gas emissions to account for the embodied chemical usage during farming transportation and landfill decomposing of overproduced food waste a statistical analysis of the changes in decision variable values across each of the efficient frontiers can then be performed to identify the key variables that could be modified to reduce the amount of wasted food at minimal increase in shortfalls or alternatively to reduce the amount of shortfalls at minimal increase in waste we illustrate our approach with an application to empirical data from campus dining services operations at the university of missouri our analysis suggests that targeted production level modifications rather than blanket increases or decreases can allow food service providers to reduce overproduction food waste without significant increases in demand shortfalls

production efficiency of british building societies the purpose of this paper is to examine the relative efficiency of british building societies and to find out whether efficiency factor is the driving force behind the merging of small building societies efficiency indices for societies are derived from a 1981 sample of cross section data the results indicate wide disparities in efficiency these differences are not related to the size of building societies but apparently to managers skill and motivation

production control in the face of storable raw material random supply and an outside market we study a periodic review production inventory control problem where both the supply of raw material and demand for the finished product are exogenous and random the raw material can be stored for future use can be purchased from or sold to an outside market we study both the lost sales and backlogging cases under both strict convex and linear raw material purchasing selling costs convexity of the purchasing selling cost implies that the more the firm purchases from or sells to the outside market the more expensive or less valuable the raw material becomes for all cases we find the partial characterizations for the optimal policies which all turn out to be very intuitively appealing in particular for each of the linear cost cases the optimal policy degenerates into a combination of two base stock policies one for the raw material inventory and the other for the finished product inventory

surface mining of coal efficiency of us interior mines in this paper the relative efficiency in surface mining of us interior coal is investigated a nonparmetric non stochasitic method is applied to 186 observations and esch firm s efficiency is calculated relative to the piecewise llinesr frontier technology in adition three sources of inefficiency are identified namely scale congestion and purely technical inefficiency the outcome of the study shows among other things that on the average captive mines are more efficient than non captive mines and that unionized mines are more efficient than non unionized mines

a coordinated multi item inventory system for perishables with random lifetime abstract this paper considers the continuous review can order s c s policy for coordinating the replenishment of multiple perishable items with random lifetimes for zero lead time we model this inventory system as a markov process an iterative procedure is proposed to solve the joint replenishment problem for perishable items under positive lead time we investigate the impact of perishability and cost parameters on the performance of the can order policy and compare it to the optimal periodic review s s policy

coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies for perishable products we analyze a joint pricing and inventory control problem for a perishable product with a fixed lifetime over a finite horizon in each period demand depends on the price of the current period plus an additive random term inventories can be intentionally disposed of and those that reach their lifetime have to be disposed of the objective is to find a joint pricing ordering and disposal policy to maximize the total expected discounted profit over the planning horizon taking into account linear ordering cost inventory holding and backlogging or lost sales penalty cost and disposal cost employing the concept of l concavity we show some monotonicity properties of the optimal policies our results shed new light on perishable inventory management and our approach provides a significantly simpler proof of a classical structural result in the literature moreover we identify bounds on the optimal order up to levels and develop an effective heuristic policy numerical results show that our heuristic policy performs well in both stationary and nonstationary settings finally we show that our approach also applies to models with random lifetimes and inventory rationing models with multiple demand classes

approximations for the relative outdating of perishable products by combining stochastic modeling simulation and regression modeling abstract in this paper we derive approximations for the expected amount of outdating waste in an inventory system with perishable products periodic review positive lead time fixed case pack sizes and a first in first out withdrawal policy demand is discrete and stochastic demand which is not met from inventory on hand will be lost the approximations can be used to evaluate how the amount of outdating can be reduced by changing the safety stock and or the product and demand characteristics we first derive approximations in an analytical way and then use regression to improve these approximations the final approximation is very fast and performs very well the mean and standard deviation of the approximation error are equal to 0 01 and 0 78 moreover the approximation is applicable in situations with parameter settings which are frequently encountered in practice and for which no other approximations have been derived in the literature before

optimal inventory policy for a perishable item with demand function sensitive to price and time abstract we formulate a model for determining the optimal pricing order quantity and replenishment period for perishable items with price dependent and time dependent demand the items have a fixed shelf life and the demand rate decreases linearly in the selling price and polynomially over the time after replenishment until it vanishes either at the reservation price or at expiration time we prove that the three variable profit maximization problem can be reduced into a single variable problem in which the variable is the duration of the replenishment period we show that the profit function is strictly pseudo concave and provide means of obtaining the optimal policy three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the model accompanied by a sensitivity analysis

s 1 s policies for perishable inventory we consider s 1 s policies for a single item whose lifetime is fixed and known with certainty demands are generated by a stationary poisson process and there is a positive leadtime for replenishment we believe this study gives the only analysis for perishables with a positive order leadtime the analysis involves the derivation of the stationary distribution of the s dimensional stochastic process corresponding to the time elapsed since the last s orders were placed this distribution is then used to obtain an expression for the expected cost rate of operating the system in steady state as a function of s a computer program has been developed to compute optimal s values and expected annual costs we report a computation for a variety of system parameters which show some of the unusual features of the problem finally we show how this model can be used in the context of a problem of optimizing availability of operating equipment subject to scheduled maintenance as well as random failure

dynamic version of the economic lot size model this article originally appeared in management science october 1958 volume 5 number 1 pp 89 96 published by the institute of management sciences a forward algorithm for a solution to the following dynamic version of the economic lot size model is given allowing the possibility of demands for a single item inventory holding charges and setup costs to vary over n periods we desire a minimum total cost inventory management scheme which satisfies known demand in every period disjoint planning horizons are shown to be possible which eliminate the necessity of having data for the full n periods

emergency lateral transshipments in a two location inventory system with positive transshipment leadtimes abstract we consider a single echelon continuous review inventory system for spare parts with two parallel locations each location faces independent poisson demand and backorders are allowed in this paper we consider the possibility of lateral transshipments between the locations the transshipment leadtime is positive and deterministic and there is an additional cost for making a transshipment we suggest a transshipment policy which is based on the timing of all outstanding orders and develop and solve a heuristic model by using theory and concepts from doubly stochastic poisson processes and also partial differential equations a simulation study indicates that our heuristic works very well and that the relative cost increase of disregarding the transshipment leadtime may be quite high our results also indicate that it is in general worth the effort of reducing the transshipment leadtime even if it is already relatively short

optimal pricing and lot sizing under conditions of perishability and partial backordering we formulate a generalized model of dynamic pricing and lot sizing by a reseller who sells a perishable good we assume that when it is economic to backlog demand the reseller can plan for periods of shortage during which demand can be partially backordered when the good is highly perishable the reseller may need to backlog demand in order to market the good at a reasonable price we present a simple solution procedure for solving the optimization problem the procedure entails solving first a single nonlinear equation and then if required two nonlinear equations

does the alternative investment market nurture firm growth a comparison between listed and private companies the creation of stock market segments with low admission requirements was welcomed in the 1990s as an essential move to release small and medium sized enterprises from their dependency on banks for external funding thereby removing the financial barriers that hinder their growth and competitiveness but does easier access to public equity really translate into superior real performance we explore this issue by focusing on the alternative investment market aim a junior segment of the london stock exchange that has experienced long lasting growth in capitalization

financial constraints and firm dynamics this study analyzes the effect of financial constraints fcs on firm dynamics we measure fcs with an official credit rating which captures availability and cost of external resources we find that fcs undermine average firm growth induce anti correlation in growth patterns and reduce the dependence of growth volatility on size fcs are also associated with higher volatility and asymmetries in growth shock distributions preventing young fast growing firms especially from seizing attractive growth opportunities and further deteriorating the growth prospects of already slow growing firms particularly if old the sub diffusive nature of the growth process of constrained firms is compatible with the distinctive properties of their size distribution

inventory problems with perishable items fixed lifetimes and backlogging our model deals with a single product and a single stock location with poisson demand the replenishment leadtime from the external supplier is fixed the lifetime of the product is also fixed and aging is assumed to begin when the order is placed when the age of a unit has reached its lifetime the unit is useless and thus discarded from the system the replenishment policy is assumed to be an order up to s policy demand that cannot be met immediately is backordered we consider three different cases where the service requirements are represented by 1 backorder costs per unit 2 a service level constraint 3 backorder costs per unit and time unit cases 1 and 2 are solved exactly while an approximation is developed for case 3 we show how the results from an earlier paper assuming lost sales can be used to solve the considered problems our results are compared to the results in a related paper considering q r policies c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

dynamic pricing and ordering decisions by a monopolist this paper considers the relationship between pricing and ordering decisions for a monopolistic retailer facing a known demand function where over the inventory cycle the product may exhibit i physical decay or deterioration of inventory called wastage and ii decrease in market value called value drop associated with each unit of inventory on hand the retailer is allowed to continuously vary the selling price of the product over the cycle we introduce a notion of instantaneous margin and use it to derive profit maximizing conditions for the retailer the model explains the markdown of retail goods subject to decay it also provides guidance in determining when price changes during the cycle are worthwhile due to product aging how often such changes should be made and how such changes affect ordering intervals and quantities