the joint economic lot sizing problem review and extensions with the growing focus on supply chain management firms realize that inventories across the entire supply chain can be more efficiently managed through greater cooperation and better coordination this paper presents a comprehensive and up to date review of the joint economic lot sizing problem jelp and also provides some extensions of this important problem in particular a detailed mathematical description of and a unified framework for the main jelp models are given additionally a comparative empirical study of the main policies proposed for jelp is conducted the focus of this study is on assessing the deviation of these policies from the optimal solution studying the performance of different models provides additional insights that will help in justifying their use in more complex supply chain models that involve more stages or other practical considerations of interest

joint pricing and ordering policy for two echelon imperfect production inventory model with two cycles abstract this study deals with an imperfect epq economic production quantity price dependent inventory model over two types of cycles in the first cycle the retailer sells only good product with actual price and in the second he sells the products with a discount price in the production run time the non conforming items are produced at a random rate and they are reworked after the regular production run time and the reworked items are almost perfect as good as original quality items the retailer starts the second cycle when a certain percent of good items are left to him after the completion of regular production the retailer continues simultaneously two cycles up to which both types of the products are available to him now our objective is to find out optimal ordering lot size and optimal price for which the profit of the integrated model is maximum also we check the best strategy of retailer for the time of starting second cycle a numerical example is provided to illustrate the behavior and application of the model

joint economic procurement production delivery policy for multiple items in a single manufacturer multiple retailer system abstract this paper proposes an analytical model to effectively integrate and synchronize the procurement production and delivery activities in a supply chain consisting of a single raw material supplier a single manufacturer and multiple retailers the manufacturer produces multiple items on a single facility utilizing common raw material under a common rotation cycle policy of not incurring shortages at any retailers this problem is formulated as a variant of the classical economic lot scheduling problem the objective is to find the production sequence of multiple items the common production cycle length and the delivery frequencies and quantities that minimize the average total cost an efficient heuristic algorithm is presented to solve the proposed problem through numerical tests we show that the proposed heuristic gives quite satisfactory solutions

optimal retail contracts with asymmetric information and moral hazard constrained joint profit maximizing retail contracts are derived when the dealer is privately informed about demand conditions before contracting with the manufacturer demand is increased by dealer promotion which is unobservable by the manufacturer consequently the manufacturer does not know whether to attribute a low level of sales to a decline in demand or to a lack of promotion we show that in general the optimal contract exhibits some form of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing the type of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing depends on how price and quantity affect the link between sales and promotion

correlations of brothers earnings and intergenerational transmission correlations between parent and child earnings reflect intergenerational mobility and more broadly correlations between siblings earnings reflect shared community and family background these earnings relationships capture important aspects of relations in socioeconomic status more generally we estimate intergenerational transmission and sibling correlations of life cycle earnings jointly within a unified framework that nests previous models using data on the danish population of father first son second son triads we find that intergenerational effects account for on average 72 percent of sibling correlations this share is higher than all previous studies because we allow for heterogeneous intergenerational transmission between families sibling correlations exhibit a u shape over the working life consistent with differences in human capital investments between families

channel coordination under price protection midlife returns and end of life returns in dynamic markets this paper examines three channel policies that are used in declining price environments price protection p is a mechanism under which the manufacturer pays the retailer a credit applying to the retailer s unsold inventory when thewholesale price drops during the life cycle midlife returns m allow the retailer to return units partway through the life cycle at some rebate and end of life returns e allow the retailer to return unsold units at the end of the life cycle under decliningretail prices if the wholesale prices and the return rebates are set properly then em i e midlife and end of life returns achieves channel coordination however such a policy may not be implementable because it may require the manufacturer to be worse off as a result of coordination if p is used in addition to em and the terms are set properly then pem guarantees both coordination and a win win outcome if theretail price is constant over time then em is sufficient to guarantee both coordination and a win win outcome

a note on integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time abstract ben daya and hariga 2004 integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time international journal of production economics 92 75 80 recently proposed the paper about integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time the lead time is proportional to the lot size produced by the vendor in addition to a fixed delay due to the transportation setup and nonproductive time the end customers accept backorders when the shortage occurs at the buyer side an order to the vendor is placed each time the inventory level reaches the reorder point in this note a modified model is proposed under a different assumption that there are two different reorder points and service levels

joint economic lot sizing problem for a three layer supply chain with stochastic demand abstract this paper considers the joint economic lot sizing problem jelp for multi layer supply chain with multi retailers and single manufacturer and supplier the paper extends the work of ben daya et al 2013 and relaxes the assumption of deterministic demand and constant holding and ordering costs the paper proposes modifying four computational intelligent algorithms to solve mixed integer problems and compares their performance for solving the problem at hand the paper further compares between adopting a centralized safety stock policy versus a decentralized policy results showed cuckoo search to outperform other tested algorithms and also favored adopting a centralized policy

growth rate heterogeneity and the covariance structure of life cycle earnings using u s panel data on adult males i compare the profile heterogeneity model of earnings dynamics in which the earnings experience profile varies across individuals to a competing model in which earnings has a unit root the latter specification enjoys increasing popularity among researchers my analysis questions this favor suggesting the profile heterogeneity model provides a more consistent representation of the data i also provide new estimates of the variation in earnings growth rates previous evidence is from relatively unrepresentative samples individuals one standard deviation above the mean enjoy a 20 30 earnings advantage in just 10 years

monopoly provision of product quality and warranties an exploration in the theory of multi dimensional screening we address the monopoly problem of designing and pricing a product line of goods distinguished by different quality and warranty levels consumers vary in their evaluations of these attributes so that the problem is one of screening it is sufficiently complex that the local approach commonly used does not work instead we use new techniques for dealing with incentive constraints between nonadjacent consumer types these techniques allow us to characterize optimal allocations that may not be monotonic in particular although the more eager types of buyer do pay higher prices and yield the monopoly higher profit they may receive lower quality or lower warranty coverage we find preference restrictions that restore monotonicity concave risk tolerance implies that warranty coverage increases in type and constant absolute risk aversion implies that quality increases in type

lot sizing and lead time decisions in production inventory systems traditionally lot sizing decisions in inventory management trade off the cost of placing orders against the cost of holding inventory however when these lot sizes are to be produced in a finite capacity production inventory system the lot size has an important impact on the lead times which in turn determine inventory levels and costs in this paper we study the lot sizing decision in a production inventory setting where lead times are determined by a queueing model that is linked endogenously to the orders placed by the inventory model assuming a continuous review s s inventory policy we develop a procedure to obtain the distribution of lead times and the distribution of inventory levels when lead times are endogenously determined by the inventory model this procedure allows to determine the optimal inventory parameters within the class of s s policies that minimize the expected ordering and inventory related costs over time we numerically show that ignoring the endogeneity of lead times may lead to inappropriate lot sizing decisions and significantly higher costs this cost discrepancy is very outspoken if the lot size based on the economic order quantity deviates significantly from desirable production lot sizes in these cases the endogenous treatment of lead times is of particular importance

integrated inventory model for deteriorating items under a multi echelon supply chain environment abstract as the industrial environment becomes more competitive supply chain management has become essential the objective of this research is to develop a multi echelon inventory model for a deteriorating item and to derive an optimal joint total cost from an integrated perspective among the supplier the producer and the buyer a computer code is developed to derive the optimal solution a numerical example is given to illustrate the model this paper shows that the integrated approach strategy results in the lowest joint total cost as compared with the independent decision approaches

integrated pricing and lot sizing decision in a two echelon supply chain with a finite production rate abstract in this paper we consider a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer selling the product manufactured by the supplier in a market in which the demand for the product is decreasing in the price set by the retailer previous research on coordinating the supply chain with price sensitive demand often assumes that either the supplier purchases the product or the supplier has an infinitely large production rate we consider explicitly the supplier s finite production rate in the pricing and lot sizing decision which causes the problem much more challenging we first investigate the optimization problem in the decentralized scenario to find the optimal order quantity and selling price for the retailer as well as the optimal wholesale price and lot size multiplier for the supplier we then solve the joint optimization problem in the centralized supply chain to find the optimal order quantity the selling price and the optimal lot size multiplier we provide two sequential algorithms to solve the joint optimization problem computational experiments show that the algorithms are effective all 448 tested problems are solved optimally and efficient it only takes a few iterations to converge for each tested problem the supply chain coordination mechanism is then designed through an all unit quantity discount policy and a franchise fee

price discrimination by a many product firm determining the optimal selling strategy for a multiproduct firm facing consumers with unknown tastes is a difficult task this paper aims to show how almost optimal nonlinear tariffs can often be found when the number of products becomes large

carbon emissions and energy effects on a two level manufacturer retailer closed loop supply chain model with remanufacturing subject to different coordination mechanisms abstract this paper presents two models classical and vmi cs coordination for a two level closed loop supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer with a facility to remanufacture used items the paper considers three critical environmental issues which are the energy used in production manufacturing and remanufacturing processes ghg emissions from production and transportation activities subject to a penalty tax and the number of times to remanufacture recover a used item numerical results show that the traditional optimization approach which minimises the sum of inventory related costs suggested less remanufacturing fewer recovery times and more ghg emissions and energy usage a result of operating at high production rates the vmi cs model was shown to be more economical than the classical model for a wide range of manufacturing rates but not necessarily a more environmentally responsible choice an extensive numerical analysis was conducted to enrich the discussion and to draw some managerial insights on how to make environmentally conscious decisions

optimal strategy for the integrated vendor buyer inventory model this note is concerned with the integrated vendor buyer inventory model two different strategies have been proposed in the literature for the problem one where the delivery quantity to the buyer at each replenishment is identical and another strategy where at each delivery all the inventory available with the vendor is supplied to the buyer we show that there is no one strategy that obtains the best solution for all possible problem parameters we also present the results of a detailed numerical study that analyses the relative performance of the two strategies for various problem parameters

analysis and applications of replenishment problems under stepwise transportation costs and generalized wholesale prices abstract in this study we analyze the replenishment decision of a buyer with the objective of maximizing total expected profits the buyer faces stepwise freight costs in inbound transportation and a hybrid wholesale price schedule given by a combination of all units discounts with economies and diseconomies of scale this general cost structure enables the model and the proposed solution to be also used for the supplier selection of a buyer under the single sourcing assumption we show that the buyer s replenishment problem reduces to finding and comparing the solutions of the following two subproblems i a replenishment problem involving wholesale prices given by an all units discount schedule with economies of scale and a lower bound on the replenishment quantity and ii a replenishment problem involving wholesale prices given by an all units discount schedule with diseconomies of scale and an upper bound on the replenishment quantity we propose solution methods for these two subproblems each of which stands alone as practical problems and utilize these methods to optimally solve the buyer s replenishment problem

the relationship between wage growth and wage levels we estimate the covariance between the permanent component of wages and a random coefficient on experience in models both with potential experience and with actual experience actual experience is allowed to be arbitrarily correlated with both the permanent component of wages and the random component on experience we find no evidence that workers of higher ability experience faster wage growth our point estimates suggest that a worker with a one standard deviation higher level of permanent ability would have a return to annual potential experience that is 0 61 of a percentage point lower the analogous point estimate for actual experience is 0 87 of a point lower contrary to the popular perception wage growth among low skill workers appears to be at least as high as that for a medium skilled worker copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

coordinating a three level supply chain with learning based continuous improvement abstract learning curve theory has been widely used as a managerial tool to describe and model product and process improvement this paper investigates a three level supply chain supplier manufacturer retailer where the manufacturing operations undergo a learning based continuous improvement process improvements in the manufacturer s operation are characterized by enhanced capacity utilization reductions in set ups times and improved product quality through the elimination of rework as a result of these continuous improvements the manufacturer can justify a production policy that is based on more frequent smaller lot size production for this production policy to be practical and not sub optimal to the supply chain the manufacturer must integrate its lot sizing models with the replenishment policies of its upstream raw material suppliers and the demand requirements of its downstream customers retailers mathematical models that achieve chain wide lot sizing integration are developed and solution procedures for the models are illustrated by numerical examples the results demonstrate that learning based improvements in set up time and rework allow retailers to order in progressively smaller lot sizes as the manufacturer offers larger discounts and profits and that the entire supply chain benefits from implementing learning based continuous quality improvements the results also demonstrate that forgetting effects lead to increases in supply chain costs

integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time abstract in this paper we consider the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem we relax the assumption of deterministic demand and assume that the lead time is varying lineraly with the lot size the lead time is composed of a lot size dependent run time and constant delay times such as moving waiting and setup times a solution procedure is suggested for solving the proposed model and numerical examples are used to illustrate the benefit of integration a sensitivity analysis is also performed to explore the effect of key parameters on lot size reorder point and expected total cost

regulating a monopolist with unknown demand and cost functions we consider the design of regulatory policy when the regulator is imperfectly informed about both the firm s cost function and the demand function it faces to some extent the optimal policy here is the natural combination of the optimal policies when there is uncertainty only about either demand or cost important qualitative differences also exist however for example it may be optimal to set prices below marginal cost and the pricing authority delegated to the firm may be more limited when there is uncertainty about both cost and demand

customer return policies for experience goods this paper studies the economic rationale for customer return policies by focusing on the experience goods aspect of many products return policies allow consumers to defer their purchasing decisions until after they gain some experience with goods in so doing they insure consumers against ex post loss which allows a monopoly seller to charge more than otherwise it is shown that the seller adopts the return policy when consumers are highly risk averse or retail costs are high consumers are strictly better off under the return policy but there is too little adoption of the policy in equilibrium copyright 1996 by blackwell publishing ltd

the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with a generalised policy abstract this note considers a more general type of policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model than has hitherto been presented based on successive shipments to the buyer within a single production batch increasing by a fixed factor

a joint economic lot size model with financial collaboration and uncertain investment opportunity establishing long term relationships among the members of a supply chain has become necessary to enhance the supply chain s competitiveness in a globalized environment besides coordinating operational decisions such as how much and when to produce or to order the members of a supply chain may also share financial resources or act jointly on the capital market this is important especially when companies have unequal access to capital for example because they are located in countries with different economic conditions and banking policies and or they have different credit ratings the joint financing of investments across the supply chain may thus ensure the stability of production and of the flow of products to the customers in addition it strengthens the established relationships among the supply chain members the paper at hand takes up these issues and presents a joint economic lot size model that allows investments financed cooperatively by the members of the supply chain in particular it considers a two stage single vendor single buyer supply chain and assumes that the vendor has the option to invest in increasing its production rate the outcome of these attempts to improve production capabilities however is uncertain and subject to an investment success probability due to different access to capital the vendor and the buyer may also share the investment and the outcome uncertainty which can be beneficial to both parties

return to experience and initial wage level do low wage workers catch up summary this paper estimates the relationship between initial wage and return to experience we use a mincer like wage model to non parametrically estimate this relationship allowing for an unobservable individual permanent effect in wages and unobservable individual return to experience the relationship between return to experience and unobservable individual ability is negative when conditioning on educational attainment while the relationship between return to experience and educational attainment is positive we link our findings to three main theories of wage growth namely search unobserved productivity and learning and human capital we devise several empirical tests in order to separate the theories we find evidence in favor of the unobserved productivity and learning model and mixed evidence regarding the search model we find no evidence in support of the human capital model copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

on improving the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with a generalized policy abstract in this note a simple procedure is suggested for modifying shipment size as obtained on applying the procedure given by hill european journal of operational research 97 1997 493 499

a dynamic model for the single vendor multi buyer problem abstract we consider a problem of a dynamic production distribution situation for a single product we examine the situation where a vendor produces a product in a batch production environment and supplies it to multiple buyers under deterministic conditions stationarity of buyers demands does not imply stationarity of the demand at the vendor which follows a periodic sequence we consider buyers and the vendor demands as periodic sequences in this case some turnpike policies relative to the class of periodic dynamic parameter problems are recommended some remarks on the existence of planning and forecast horizons are also given

an integrated inventory model for a single vendor and multiple buyers with ordering cost reduction abstract forming strategic alliances and utilizing modern information technologies have been the two most important ways for firms to gain such competitive advantages as lower logistics costs and secure customers loyalty in this paper we consider an integrated inventory system where a single vendor purchases and processes raw materials in order to deliver finished items to multiple buyers the vendor and all buyers are willing to invest in reducing the ordering cost e g establishing an electronic data interchange based inventory control system in order to decrease their joint total cost the amount of investment determines the planned ordering cost and hence affects their replenishment decisions one major managerial implication from this ordering cost reduction is that the efforts to streamline and speedup transactions via the application of information technologies may result in a higher degree of coordination and automation among allied trading parties an analytical model is developed to derive the optimal investment amount and replenishment decisions for both vendor and buyers the exponential ordering cost function is then applied to our general model and a numerical analysis is performed to provide interesting insights of the model numerical results show that the vendor and all the buyers can benefit directly from substantial cost savings by this ordering cost reduction investment

monopoly with incomplete information recent theoretical research on principal agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other s actions here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal the monopolist the main contribution is to show that under a separability assumption strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market the results also shed light on related topics such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling

delay in payments a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from supply chains abstract the purpose of this paper is to study the effects of various scenarios of delay in payments a form of trade credit by a buyer after receiving items while including various costs such as fuel cost the costs of carbon emissions from manufacturing and transportation activities order cost and setup cost in a two echelon coordinated supply chain the model developed optimizes the environmental and economic performance of a supply chain the study presents a comparison of different scenarios through numerical examples and sensitivity analyses the main contribution of this paper is the joint consideration of delays in payments and the costs of transportation cost and carbon emissions the model has been tested with numerical examples and sensitivity analyses the findings showed that adopting delays in payments improves both environmental and economic performance of a supply chain the analyses also showed that optimizing one of the parameters from the production rate the length of delay in payments or the lot size provides the optimal solution for carbon emissions and the system cost of a supply chain this flexibility makes the model easy to use by practitioners

integrated vendor buyer cooperative models with stochastic demand in controllable lead time abstract this article presents the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory models we relax the assumption that lead time demand x is deterministic and assume that it is stochastic also we assume that shortage during the lead time is permitted and lead time can be reduced at an added cost two models are considered here in the first model the demand of lead time follows a normal distribution and in the second model it is distribution free for both cases we develop effective iterative procedures for finding the optimal policy and numerical examples are used to illustrate the benefits of integration

the right to return this article studies the allocation of responsibility for unsold inventory provision for which is made in practically every distribution contract the two extreme cases are the consignment contract which allocates all the burden to the manufacturer and the no return contract in which retailers purchase the merchandise outright and assume responsibility for unsold inventory contract choices are shown to vary across countries industries products and types of transactions the article identifies six main factors affecting this choice optimal inventory policy in a stochastic retail demand environment relative advantage in disposing of the unsold inventory optimal risk allocation incentives to invest in promotions and provide services to increase consumer demand information asymmetry and costs associated with the consignment contract per se several testable implications are presented and the choice of contracts in the publishing industry is shown to be consistent with the predictions of the model

revisiting foundations in lot sizing connections between harris crowther monahan and clark abstract while many review articles exist on deterministic lot sizing models used in the context of price and quantity discounts buyer vendor coordination supply chain management and joint economic lot sizing problems they do not convey the impact of important findings which date back to at least 2002 or in hindsight to 1984 as a result many recent articles still model the financial implications of lot sizing decisions without having the assurance that these models would help the firm s involved in maximising the net present value npv this paper therefore reviews these findings while adding also its own contributions as to convey the general importance to lot sizing theory we show that the underlying principles used in the four key articles that have led to a division in modelling approaches are in fact all in line with npv and argue that therefore there should not be these discrepancies that currently persist in the literature we establish the connections between these four strands of the literature using the solution to a simple variation of harris eoq model deriving thereby results from boyaci and gallego 2002 and beullens and janssens 2011 but showing their general applicability to any type of supply chain structure the breath of implications to deterministic lot sizing theory is illustrated using practical examples we present a stochastic version of the model of crowther 1964 which is arguably the least understood and applied model but on the other hand the most important one in realising how these modelling strands can be unified

an integrated vendor buyer inventory model with quality improvement and lead time reduction abstract the success of the japanese in the employment of just in time jit production has received a great deal of attention in the past two decades the underlying goal of jit is to eliminate wastes which can be achieved through various efforts such as shortening lead time and improving quality recently yang and pan 2004 just in time purchasing an integrated inventory model involving deterministic variable lead time and quality improvement investment international journal of production research 42 5 853 863 have studied the effects of lead time reduction and quality improvement investment on an integrated inventory model the objective of this study is to extend yang and pan s 2004 model by allowing for shortages and using the reorder point as a decision variable that is this article develops an integrated inventory model which jointly determines the optimal order quantity reorder point process quality lead time and the frequency of deliveries simultaneously analytical results that characterize the exact optimal policy for the problem described above are devised to develop efficient and optimal computational procedures furthermore a numerical example is given to illustrate the results

earnings instability and tenure we study the effect of tenure on earnings instability in italy using two alternative estimation strategies first we use a descriptive measure of earnings instability and fixed effects regressions second we develop a formal model of earnings dynamics distinguishing permanent from transitory earnings and exploit variation of tenure and instability over time and across birth cohorts in estimation we use the two approaches also to evaluate earnings instability associated with temporary contracts short tenure contracts our results indicate that each year of tenure on the job reduces earnings instability on average by 11 workers on a temporary contract have an earnings instability up to 50 higher than workers on a permanent contract

unemployment insurance wage dynamics and inequality over the life cycle we investigate the relationship between life cycle wages and individual membership of unemployment insurance schemes in denmark we separate permanent from transitory wages and characterise them using membership of unemployment insurance funds we find that unemployment insurance is associated with lower wage growth heterogeneity over the life cycle and greater wage instability changing the nature of wage inequality from permanent to transitory although we are in general unable to formally test for moral hazard against adverse selection into unemployment insurance robustness checks suggest that moral hazard is the relevant interpretation

controlling opportunism in vertical contracting when production precedes sales in a make to stock vertical contracting setting with private contracts when retailers do not observe each other s stocks before choosing their prices an opportunism problem always exist in contract equilibria but public market wide resale price maintenance rpm can restore monopoly power however other widely used tools which do not fall under antitrust scrutiny and require only private bilateral contracts such as buyback contracts also allow the producer to fully exercise his monopoly power we conclude that a more lenient policy toward rpm is unlikely to affect the producer s ability to control opportunism

an operational policy for a three stage distributive supply chain system with retailers backorders abstract this research deals with a production inventory problem consisting of three stage tree type single producer multi distributor and multi retailer supply chain network where a model has been developed for achieving the lowest total cost for operating a supply chain system with allowable shortage in this research the shortage is assumed to occur in a form of backorder the refrigerator manufacturing can suitably be used to illustrate the scenario which makes the situation more rational and realistic by assumptions the customers will not go somewhere else the cost of lost sale is not included in this case the total cost of this tree type distributive supply chain system is comprised of setup costs and holding costs at all echelons and the backorder cost at retailer level only a replenishment policy is sought to operate the system at a minimum cost the problem is formulated as an unconstrained mixed integer programming problem and a newly developed doubly hybrid meta heuristic algorithm is adopted as the solution procedure the solutions which determine the desired replenishment policy for the producer distributors and retailers are obtained to minimize the total system cost a sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the outcome of the proposed solution procedure presented in this research numerical results are generated to demonstrate the solution procedure and future research is indicated for further study

an exact policy for enhancing buyer supplier linkage in supply chain system abstract kim s l and ha d 2003 a jit lot splitting model for supply chain management enhancing buyer supplier linkage international journal of production economics 86 1 10 proposed a novel cooperative method for synchronizing supply with actual customer demand in a just in time scenario however all decision variables obtained using their model may not be integers making it difficult to be implemented in fixed cycle applications i e a planning horizon of one time period in addition their model can only be used to solve joint optimization for single buyer and single supplier furthermore problems arise when resource constraints are added to their model because traditional inventory models do not allow constraints to be added by the decision maker arbitrarily to improve the practical utility of the model of kim and ha 2003 we derive a mixed integer optimization approach which not only can be applied to the joint optimization for the multi buyer and single supplier but also all decision variables obtained are executable integers for the planning horizon of one time period to suit real world situations infinite planning horizon scenario is also considered in this study in addition illustrative examples are included to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed models in which the integrated purchase policy being superior to independent optimization can be clearly seen moreover the analytical superiority of the proposed models in terms of execution time can be seen through a computational experiment conduced on a set of logical number of buyers in the multi buyer and single supplier problem finally the performance of various approaches i e proposed models and genetic algorithm is also examined to provide valuable insight into the practical problem

how accurate is the integrated vendor buyer continuous model abstract the classic single item deterministic demand integrated vendor buyer model is revisited the decision problem may also be viewed as that of one centralized firm dealing with a two level eoq like supply chain with finite production rates it is sought to optimize the production lot size and the integral number of its shipments in equal batches from the vendor to the buyer while the problem calls for discrete optimization techniques we introduced a continuous model where one can take derivatives with respect to both variables in this short paper we establish a 98 5 lower bound on the accuracy of this continuous model

explaining and forecasting results of the self sufficiency project this paper studies the self sufficiency project ssp a controlled randomized experiment concerning welfare by estimating a model of endogenous skill accumulation multidimensional job opportunities and time varying opportunity costs of labour market time methods for estimating dynamic programming models with unobserved heterogeneity are extended to account for unexpected policy interventions and endogenous sample selection and initial conditions parameters are identified and consistently estimated by imposing optimal responses to the exact form of the ssp earnings supplement and the experimental program which induces exogenous variation between treatment groups and within groups as treatment progresses the estimated model tracks primary outcomes well in and out of sample except for underestimating trends in the sample of new welfare applicants predictions from counterfactual experiments run counter to non structural results reported elsewhere and they suggest that details of the ssp s design are critical for interpretation of results the separate ssp plus treatment may have longer lasting and more generalized impacts than the in sample impacts suggest copyright oxford university press

optimal reverse channel structure for consumer product returns consumers often return a product to a retailer because they learn after purchase that the product does not match as well with preferences as had been expected this is a costly issue for retailers and manufacturers in fact it is estimated that the u s electronics industry alone spent 13 8 billion dollars in 2007 to restock returned products lawton c 2008 the war on returns wall street journal may 8 d1 the bulk of these returns were nondefective items that simply were not what the consumer wanted to eliminate returns and to recoup the cost of handling returns many retailers are adopting the practice of charging restocking fees to consumers as a penalty for making returns this paper employs an analytical model of a bilateral monopoly to examine the impact of reverse channel structure on the equilibrium return policy and profit more specifically we examine how the return penalty is affected by whether returns are salvaged by the manufacturer or by the retailer interestingly we find that the return penalty may be more severe when returns are salvaged by a channel member who derives greater value from a returned unit also the manufacturer may earn greater profit by accepting returns even if the retailer has a more efficient outlet for salvaging units

manufacturer s return policies and retail competition manufacturers returns policies are a common feature in the distribution of many products the obvious rationale for returns policies is insurance practitioners not surprisingly have a different perspective and view returns as a cost of doing business in this paper we study the strategic effect of returns policies on retail competition and highlight its profitability implications for a manufacturer the setting for our research is the distribution of products with uncertain demand limited shelf lives and retail competition our objective is to provide a better understanding of when manufacturers should adopt returns policies the insights are obtained with a model based on the economics of strategy and decision making under uncertainty we show that when retailing is competitive and there is no uncertainty in demand a returns policy subtly induces retailers to compete more intensely the provision of a returns policy reduces retail prices without affecting wholesale prices thereby reducing retailer margins and improving manufacturer profitability the intuition is that with a returns policy cournot like levels of retail stocks cannot be sustained each retailer will order stocks so that it will not be constrained by stocks and so intensifying retail competition when however demand is uncertain and there is a single retailer a returns policy encourages the retailer to over stock and so decreases upstream manufacturer profits while the provision of a returns policy leads to lower retail margins the optimality of returns policy depends on the overall uncertainty and marginal cost a returns policy reduces the dispersion in retail prices between the high and low states of demand and the range of retail prices in the returns case is contained within the range of retail prices for the no returns case in the general setting when there are competing retailers and demand is uncertain there is a trade off for the manufacturer between the benefits more intense retail competition and the costs excessive stocking of a returns policy we find that a manufacturer should accept returns when the marginal production cost is sufficiently low and demand uncertainty is not too great to validate the results of our theory we conduct an empirical test with data from a major u s retailer the tests confirm our prediction that a returns policy intensifies retail competition and reduces retailer margins our theory and empirical test should interest practitioners and researchers in distribution especially those concerned with managing retail competition

coordinated supply chain management abstract historically the three fundamental stages of the supply chain procurement production and distribution have been managed independently buffered by large inventories increasing competitive pressures and market globalization are forcing firms to develop supply chains that can quickly respond to customer needs to remain competitive these firms must reduce operating costs while continuously improving customer service with recent advances in communications and information technology as well as a rapidly growing array of logistics options firms have an opportunity to reduce operating costs by coordinating the planning of these stages in this paper we review the literature addressing coordinated planning between two or more stages of the supply chain placing particular emphasis on models that would lend themselves to a total supply chain model finally we suggest directions for future research

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

demand uncertainty and price maintenance markdowns as destructive competition this paper offers a new theory of destructive competition the authors compare minimum resale price maintenance to retail market clearing in a model with a monopolistic manufacturer selling to competitive retailers in both the resale price maintenance and flexible price games retailers must order inventories before the realization of demand uncertainty the authors find that manufacturer profits and equilibrium inventories are higher under resale price maintenance than under market clearing surprisingly consumer surplus can also be higher in which case unfettered retail competition can legitimately be called destructive copyright 1997 by american economic association

an optimal policy for a single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem with process unreliability consideration abstract this article develops a model to determine an optimal integrated vendor buyer inventory policy for flawed items in a just in time manufacturing environment the objective is to minimize the total joint annual costs incurred by the vendor and the buyer the production process is assumed to deteriorate during processing and produces a certain number of defective items for practical purpose the article is concerned with the policy in which the delivery quantity to the buyer is identical at each replenishment the expected annual integrated total cost function is derived and a solution procedure is established to find out the optimal solution finally the solution technique is illustrated with a numerical example available in the literature

vertical price controls with uncertain demand a manufacturer distributes output before knowing demand and thus risks making more than its rivalrous independent retailers can sell at the monopoly price if demand is low retailers may therefore resell more than the joint profit maximizing output anticipating this they will not pay as much for the merchandise ex ante as they would if the manufacturer could commit to preventing rivalry the manufacturer has many options including vertical integration chain outlets restricted output buy backs just in time deliveries and minimum resale prices the article discusses each option s advantages and disadvantages and concludes that all roads lead to resale price maintenance the article closes with an alternative to the dealercartel hypothesis for minimum resale prices

analysis of batch ordering inventory models with setup cost and capacity constraint abstract stochastic periodic review batch ordering inventory problems appear in many industrial settings however few literature deals with the optimal ordering polices for such problems no mention to the inclusion of the fixed ordering cost and the production capacity in this paper we consider a single item periodic review batch ordering inventory system with the consideration of the setup cost and the capacity constraint for each order over a finite planning horizon by proposing several new convex notions we show that a batch based s s policy is optimal for the unlimited ordering capacity case while for the limited ordering capacity case a modified r q policy is optimal for the setting with zero ordering setup cost and a batch based x y band policy for the setting with positive ordering setup cost moreover we analytically study the sensitivity of the policy parameters with respect to the capacity and batch order size and derive the bounds on the optimal policy parameters we further extend our analysis to the infinite horizon setting and show that the structure of the optimal policy remains similar finally the numerical experiments provide some insights into the impact of model parameters on the benefit of reducing the batch size and increasing the ordering capacity and indicate that ignoring batch requirement may lead to a significant cost increment

optimal production and shipment models for a single vendor single buyer integrated system abstract this paper develops a more general production inventory model for a single vendor single buyer integrated system unlike the hitherto existing production inventory models for the vendor buyer system the present model neither requires the buyer s unit holding cost greater than the vendor s nor assumes the structure of shipment policy secondly the model is extended to the situation with shortages permitted based on shortages being allowed to occur only for the buyer thirdly the paper also presents a corresponding production inventory model for a deteriorating item for the integrated system the solution procedures are provided for finding the optimal production and shipment policies and illustrated with numerical examples three significant insights are shown 1 no matter whether the buyer s unit holding cost is greater than the vendor s or not the present model always performs best in reducing the average total cost as compared to the hitherto existing models 2 if the buyer s unit holding cost is less than the vendor s the optimal shipment policy for the integrated system will only comprise shipments with successive shipment sizes increasing by a fixed factor it is different from that obtained by hill hill r m 1999 the optimal production and shipment policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem international journal of production research 37 2463 2475 for the opposite case 3 when designing a single vendor single buyer integrated system making the buyer s unit holding cost lower than the vendor s is more beneficial to the system if shortages are not permitted to occur otherwise it just reverses

an integrated production inventory model with imperfect production processes and weibull distribution deterioration under inflation abstract this study develops an integrated production and inventory model from the perspectives of both the manufacturer and the retailer the model assumes a varying rate of deterioration partial backordering inflation imperfect production processes and multiple deliveries the elapsed time until the production process shift is assumed to be arbitrarily distributed the discounted cash flow and classical optimization technique are used to derive the optimal solution a numerical example including the sensitivity analysis is given to validate the results of the production inventory model the integrated decision results in lower optimal joint cost compared with an independent decision by the manufacturer and the retailer

the optimal and heuristic solutions of a distribution network abstract competitive environment of global networking and customization call for cost reduction in arborescent tree like inventory system one of the keys to cost reduction is the integration of the supply chain much practical research has been done in the area of integrating the inventory system in recent years integration involves the joint decision making among the producer the distributors and the retailers in the supply chain by revising goyal s model an optimal solution is derived in this paper a heuristic solution model is also developed for a producer distributors retailers inventory system using the principle of strategic partnership numerical results indicate the heuristic solution is a good estimation of the optimal solution

improving supply chain sustainability using exergy analysis abstract sustainable supply chain management is the improved level of management through the integration of environmental and social issues in parallel to the economic issues it has emerged as a growing subject that now receives increasing interest from practitioners and academicians limited attempts have been made to take a broader look at the overall issues that form the core topics of this type of supply chain in fact there have been many exclusive studies that investigated the impact of inadvertent or unavoidable costs of supply chain processes exergy analysis is a powerful thermodynamic tool that may be employed to analyze and identify the inefficiencies in a process or a system it has also been extended to efficiently evaluate how sustainable an industrial system process or product is this paper introduces exergetic models that compute and compare the consumed exergy for two coordination policies it also evaluates the consumed exergy when producing ordering locally versus globally it recognizes the importance of financial social and environmental aspects of choosing the more sustainable destination to produce and distribute a product numerical examples are presented and discussed to provide some insights for managers and decision makers to select between domestic policies based on the consumed exergy and the monetary cost results show that societies can gain more from less consumed exergy and firms can save on some costs when producing ordering domestically this paper recommends to governments and other stakeholders to take actions that are effective in making societies consume resources wisely

a complete solution to a class of principal agent problems with an application to the control of a self managed firm this paper considers a class of principal agent problems which have the following features 1 there is adverse selection because the principal ignores the value of one parameter of the agent s true characteristics 2 leaving aside the information parameter the principal s welfare as well as the agent s welfare depend on two types of variables observable to both of them the first ones possibly multidimensional are called action variable s and the second one which is one dimensional has in general the meaning of a money transfer 3 the principal is a stackelberg leader of the two person game he can commit himself to decision rules which are admissible on informational grounds he optimizes within the adequate class taking into account besides the agent s reaction one constraint which has generally the meaning of an individual rationality constraint and sometimes of a feasibility constraint the optimization is limited to the class of non stochastic mechanisms 4 the problem can also receive an alternative interpretation the principal faces a continuum of agents of unknown characteristics the distribution being known however stylized principal agent problems of this type have often been considered in the economic literature in particular the reader will later be able to recognize that the standard income tax model a la mirrlees 1971 the quality or quantity choice model of the monopolist a la mussa and rosen 1978 or maskin and riley 1982 and the model of government regulation of the private monopolist of baron and myerson 1982 all belong to

joint economic lot size in distribution system with multiple shipment policy abstract this paper presents a new methodology to obtain the joint economic lot size in the case where multiple buyers are demanding one type of item from a single vendor the shipment policy is found and a new model is proposed to minimize the joint total relevant cost jtrc for both vendor and buyer s considering the two buyer and more than two buyer cases exact and approximate optimum solutions were obtained the benefits of the new model were illustrated in term of two different ratios production rate to demand rate and transportation cost to holding cost a sensitivity analysis was conducted to test the robustness of the new model

a dynamic model of supplier switching abstract while a broad branch of literature deals with the development of buyer supplier relationships limited research exists under which circumstances a buyer should terminate such a relationship and switch to a new supplier recently wagner and friedl 2007 have developed a framework to analyze a static one shot supplier switching decision when the buyer has asymmetric information about the supplier s production costs we extend their basic framework to a dynamic one assuming that the supplier learns the production costs over time when he sets up the production process since the supplier s cost information at the individual stages crucially determines the setup and the switching decision it becomes essential for supply chain management to provide proper incentives so that the supplier reveals his cost information truthfully over time we characterize the optimal setup and switching strategy as well as the optimal supply chain contract we also compare our findings with those of the static setting to provide further insights

quality improvement and setup reduction in the joint economic lot size model abstract the co maker concept has become accepted practice in many successful global business organizations this fact has resulted in a class of inventory models known as joint economic lot size jels models heretofore such models assumed perfect quality production on the part of the vendor this paper relaxes this assumption and proposes a quality adjusted jels model in addition classical optimization methods are used to derive models for the cases of setup cost reduction quality improvement and simultaneous setup cost reduction and quality improvement for the quality adjusted jels numerical results are presented for each of these models comparisons are made to the basic quality adjusted model results indicate that all three policies exhibit significantly reduced total cost however the simultaneous model results in the lowest cost overall and the smallest lot size this suggests a synergistic impact of continuous improvement programs that focus on both setup and quality improvement of the vendor s production process sensitivity analysis indicates that the simultaneous model is robust and representative of practice

the joint economic lot size problem a review abstract this article reviews lot size models which focus on coordinated inventory replenishment decisions between buyer and vendor and their impact on the performance of the supply chain these so called joint economic lot size jels models determine order production and shipment quantities from the perspective of the supply chain with the objective of minimizing total system costs this paper first describes the problem studied introduces the methodology of the review and presents a descriptive analysis of the selected papers subsequently papers are categorized and analyzed with respect to their contribution to the coordination of different echelons in the supply chain finally the review highlights gaps in the existing literature and suggests interesting areas for future research

a single vendor single manufacturer integrated inventory model with stochastic demand and variable production rate abstract this paper investigates an alternative way to react to demand uncertainty in an integrated inventory model namely the variation of the production rate that enables the manufacturer to reduce lead times and the corresponding demand uncertainty to investigate the impact of variable production rates on the supply chain this paper considers a single vendor single manufacturer integrated inventory model where the vendor ships finished products in multiples of full truckloads to the manufacturer the objective of the model is to coordinate both production and distribution of the product in such a way that the total costs of the supply chain are minimized a solution procedure is suggested and the behaviour of the model is analysed in numerical examples obviously the total supply chain cost is reduced when the manufacturer s production rate is included as a decision variable in the model these savings can generally benefit both the vendor and the manufacturer however in situations where coordinated decision making is initially not beneficial to the vendor the supply chain members can benefit from a revenue sharing contract that supports the sharing of the total savings the model proposed in the paper at hand supports both the determination of an optimal production rate as well as the distribution of coordination benefits among the supply chain members

earnings dynamics and inequality among canadian men 1976 1992 evidence from longitudinal income tax records using an extraordinary database drawn from longitudinal income tax records we decompose canada s growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components we find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long run inequality and an increase in earnings instability the canadian data strongly reject several restrictions commonly imposed in the u s literature and they also suggest that imposing these evidently false restrictions may lead to distorted inferences about earnings dynamics and inequality trends

optimizing the economic lot size of a three stage supply chain with backordering derived without derivatives abstract multi stage supply chain management integration provides a key to successful international business operations this is because the integrated approach improves the global system performance and cost efficiency the integrated production inventory models using differential calculus to solve the multi variable problems are prevalent in operational research this paper extends the integrated vendor buyer inventory problem by yang and wee yang p c wee h m 2002 the economic lot size of the integrated vendor buyer system derived without derivatives optimal control applications and methods 23 163 169 to solve the multi variable problems in the supply chain and simplifies the solution procedure using a simple algebraic method as a result the solution procedure may be easily understood and applied so as to derive the optimal solution

a cooperative inventory policy with deteriorating items for a two echelon model a cooperative inventory policy between supplier and buyer is proposed unlike other studies we consider the case of deteriorating items and permit the completed back order in the problem we solve the problem without the condition of equal replenishments periods during a specified planning horizon and present a procedure to find the optimal solution a case is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach the sensitivity analysis for a cooperation policy between supplier and buyer also are explored

using return policies to elicit retailer information we show that a manufacturer may prefer to offer a return policy when dealing with a retailer who holds advance knowledge about market conditions roughly stated the manufacturer offers a liberal return allowance in lieu of a lower price to satisfy a retailer facing unfavorable market conditions a retailer facing favorable conditions finds this tradeoff unattractive because he is likely to sell the merchandise anyway and thus not make as much use of the generous return terms as a consequence a retailer is less inclined to misstate market conditions by serving as an additional control instrument a returns policy reduces the manufacturer s need to ration cut production

empirical analysis of occupational hierarchies using data on u s engineers and the position of engineering jobs within firms this paper estimates a model of hierarchies within firms the model extends rosen s 1982 model of recursive production to two skills and multiple hierarchy levels the model generates an empirical model that is nested within a general roy 1951 model of self selection maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of the production technology and the skill experience profiles are estimated the results suggest that approximately two thirds of changes in employment shares across hierarchy levels across time are explained by demographic shifts in the stock of engineering skills most of the returns to experience and to assignment to higher hierarchy levels within firms are caused by skill accumulation and self selection rather than technological dierences across hierarchy levels

note on a necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the optimal solution of a single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with process unreliability consideration abstract chung 2008 discussed the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the optimal solution of an integrated production inventory model developed by huang 2004 which allowed a vendor and a buyer to minimize their expected integrated total cost function with an imperfect production process the objective of chung 2008 was to improve the solution procedure presented in huang 2004 in this study we identify three errors irrelevant conditions and inappropriate examples used in chung 2008 we provide a reformulation of the model and the correct necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality

optimal production inventory policy for an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand abstract an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand over a finite planning horizon is considered in this paper the objective is to devise the optimal production inventory policy to minimize the total operational cost the model is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem the problem is represented as a weighted directed acyclic graph the global minimum total operational cost is computed in polynomial time by the developed algorithm two numerical examples of a seasonal product and a product over its life cycle are studied to illustrate the results a sensitivity analysis of the system parameters is conducted to assist the supply chain decision makers

production and shipment lot sizing in a vendor buyer supply chain with transportation cost abstract previous research on the joint vendor buyer problem focused on the production shipment schedule in terms of the number and size of batches transferred between the two parties it is a fact that transportation cost is a major part of the total operational cost however in most joint vendor buyer models the transportation cost is only considered implicitly as a part of fixed setup or ordering cost and thus is assumed to be independent of the size of the shipment as such the effect of the transportation cost is not adequately reflected in final planning decisions there is a need for models involving transportation cost explicitly for better decision making in this study we analyze the vendor buyer lot sizing problem under equal size shipment policy we introduce the complete solution of the problem in an explicit and extended manner that has not existed in the literature we incorporate transportation cost explicitly into the model and develop optimal solution procedures for solving the integrated models all unit discount transportation cost structures with and without over declaration have been considered numerical examples are presented for illustrative purpose

demand uncertainty and returns policies manufacturers facing uncertain demand may induce distributors to carry ample stocks of their products by agreeing to accept returns of unsold goods for credit the authors model the manufacturer s decision to accept returns showing that this decision depends crucially on the nature of the demand uncertainty uncertainty over customer arrivals favors returns while uncertainty over consumers valuation of the manufacturer s product leads distributors to set retail prices too high from the manufacturer s standpoint when returns are allowed the authors show that returns can be expected to raise retail prices while maintaining shrinking distributor margins copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

residual income based compensation plans for controlling investment decisions under sequential private information earlier literature has pointed to the effectiveness of residual income type measures based on particular accrual accounting rules such as the relative benefit allocation rule these performance metrics have been shown to generate desirable managerial incentives when investment decisions are delegated this paper further attests to the robustness of these measures by extending the result to a sequential adverse selection model with an inherent real option an option to abandon in other words as long as the residual income measures are judiciously constructed neither private information nor the requirement to selectively exercise an option derails their use in this setting

a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the optimal solution of a single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with process unreliability consideration abstract in general an inventory problem consists of two parts 1 the modeling and 2 the solution procedure the accuracy of the solution procedure can help and simplify the implementation of the inventory model huang 2004 an optimal policy for a single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem with process unreliability consideration international journal of production economics 91 91 98 discusses a model to determine an optimal policy for a single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem with process unreliability consideration the objective is to minimize the total joint annual costs incurred by the vendor and the buyer however huang s solution procedure seems easy to cause misunderstandings so the main purpose of this paper will give the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the optimal solution to complement and improve the solution procedure of huang s inventory model

capital rationing and organizational slack in capital budgeting this paper reconciles three stylized facts about capital budgeting in firms and shows that they are tied to the presence of asymmetric information among the several members of the firm each with his or her own objectives and decisions the facts of interest are 1 the existence of organizational slack 2 the rationing of resources within organizations 3 the stated cut off rate for accepting capital projects in firms is often greater than the market rate of interest organizational slack is defined as the excess of resources allocated over the minimum necessary to accomplish the tasks assigned resource rationing is defined as the under allocation of resources i e an increase in the amount allocated would generate revenues in excess of its costs rationing and slack are both manifestations of ex post inefficiencies an lp model is used to show that these inefficiencies can occur in ex ante efficient organizational designs when asymmetric information is present the optimal allocation policy involves a hurdle rate criterion in which the hurdle rate is strictly in excess of the cost of capital thus inducing rationing in some states of the world typically resources are optimally allocated such that slack exists in other states the optimal allocation policy trades off these two inefficiencies