the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

two sided uncertainty and up or out contracts a bilateral moral hazard problem provides a rationale for up or out employment contracts the employer sets a wage higher than opportunity cost to induce the worker to invest in firm specific capital if the individual does not make the grade it is in the firm s interest ex post to fire him had the initial arrangement not included provisions for firing individuals the firm would underreport the value of the employee wrecking the incentive scheme the basic model permits both firm and worker to be risk neutral therefore it admits a straightforward multiperiod extension which we also investigate

applying and advancing internalization theory the multinational enterprise in the twenty first century internalization theory has provided a resilient analytical framework that explicitly or implicitly underlines much of international business scholarship internalization theory is not a monolithic body of knowledge instead it has devolved into several streams each of which focuses on the interests of particular epistemic communities while also acting as a more generic organizing framework for those more broadly interested in its application to real world challenges following a review of the various streams we trace the frontiers of current research of the broader internalization framework and identify emerging themes raised by the papers in the special issue these include transaction cost considerations in the bundling and recombination of assets across diverse contexts the growing relevance of quasi internalization the theoretical challenges of bounded rationality for internalization theory and the increasing disconnect between ownership control and responsibility these developments point to new research frontiers for scholars looking to apply or advance internalization theory

subjective performance measures in optimal incentive contracts objective measures of performance are seldom perfect in response incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures this paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures in respectively implicit and explicit incentive contracts naturally objective and subjective measures often are substitutes sometimes strikingly so we show that if objective measures are sufficiently close to perfect then no implicit contracts are feasible because the firm s fallback position after reneging on an implicit contract is too attractive we also show however that objective and subjective measures can reinforce each other if objective measures become more accurate then in some circumstances the optimal contract puts more weight on subjective measures because the improved objective measures increase the value of the ongoing relationship and so reduce the firm s incentive to renege we also analyze the use of subjective weights on objective performance measures and provide case study evidence consistent with our analyses

the crowding out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing an experimental study abstract this paper investigates the crowding out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing arrangements via theory and laboratory experiment our model and simulation predict that the crowding out of private transfers is often more than one for one and will reduce the total risk coverage furthermore the existence of a moderate degree of altruism exaggerates the crowding out effect especially when there is an ex ante income inequality these predictions are mostly supported by the laboratory experiment except that the crowding out effect is not more than one for one and hence the total risk coverage is not significantly reduced by formal insurance

the existence of self enforcing implicit contracts implicit contracts are nontrivial nash equilibria to the post hiring trading game between a worker and the employer these are supported by intrafirm rather than labor market reputations the existence of an implicit contract that supports efficient trade is proved in a simple model

the interaction of implicit and explicit contracts in repeated agency abstract in a repeated principal agent model in which the agent s actions are observable to the principal but not verifiable in court the agent s incentives derive both from salary payments based on verifiable signals and from implicit promises by the principal of bonuses for good behavior explicit short term contracts are designed to enhance the effectiveness of the infinite horizon implicit contract between principal and agent in a constrained efficient equilibrium bonuses smooth the consumption path of the risk averse agent by moving in the opposite direction from salaries total consumption and expected discounted utility for the rest of the game journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c73 d8

non commitment in performance evaluation and the problem of information distortions abstract auditing is modeled in a sequential game without commitment the manager must decide whether and where to audit a worker s output taking into account all interim information he has obtained the worker will work just hard enough and show it to divert the manager from making an audit or cover up withholding information about his work to make an audit more difficult this usually raises the costs of setting work incentives so incentives are softened sometimes drastically moreover when a worker s on the job information is valuable for entrepreneurial decisions work incentives must be softened to improve the internal flow of information

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

restricting the means of exchange within organizations abstract this paper considers why firms often ban monetary exchange between their employees while encouraging these trades through other means such as through the reciprocation of favours or barter despite classical inefficiencies associated with non monetary exchange we illustrate two themes as to why non monetary trade may be preferred to allowing money first the use of non monetary trade may affect the allocation of rents in surplus enhancing ways as agents respond strategically to the existence of these rents second non monetary trade improves the ability of agents to impose sanctions on those who act dishonestly

incentives between firms and within this paper reviews the significant progress in agency theory i e the economic theory of incentives during the 1990s with an eye toward applications to supply transactions i emphasize six recent models in three pairs 1 new foundations for the theory of incentive contracts 2 new directions in incentive theory and 3 new applications to supply transactions by reviewing these six models i hope to establish three things first the theory of incentive contracts needed and received new foundations second new directions in incentive theory teach us that incentive contracts are not the only source of incentives finally and especially relevant to supply transactions the integration decision is an instrument in the incentive problem

credence goods costly diagnosis and subjective evaluation we study contracting between a consumer and an expert the expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low cost service is sufficient or whether a high cost treatment is required to solve the consumer s problem this involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and signals are not observable treatments are contractible but success or failure of the low cost treatment is observed only by the consumer payments can therefore not depend on the objective outcome but only the consumer s report or subjective evaluation a failure of the low cost treatment delays the solution of the consumer s problem by the high cost treatment to a second period we show that the first best solution can always be implemented if the parties discount rate is zero an increase in the discount rate reduces the range of parameter combinations for which the first best can be obtained in an extension we show that the first best is also always implementable if diagnosis and treatment can be separated by contracting with two different agents

productive low morale abstract this paper models employment relationship as a repeated principal agent problem with private evaluation the efficient contracts exhibit correlated movements between lagged wage and current effort that are consistent with the positive feedback between pay and morale in practice low morale therefore is an integral part of a well functioning relationship

job assignments signalling and efficiency this article analyzes a model in which information about a worker s ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker other firms however use the worker s job assignment as a signal of ability three results recur throughout the analysis first wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels second there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs i e even when a firm has complete information about a worker s output third the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm specific human capital in the economy

university knowledge transfer private ownership incentives and local development objectives abstract we study the impact of private ownership incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance we develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices using new survey information together with panel data on u s universities for 1995 99 we find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones but that ownership does not affect licensing performance conditional on the use of incentive pay adopting incentive pay is associated with about 30 40 percent more income per license universities with strong local development objectives generate about 30 percent less income per license but are more likely to license to local in state start up companies in addition we show that government constraints on university licensing activity are costly in terms of forgone license income and the creation of start up companies these results are robust to controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity

piece rate incentive schemes this paper uses recent results from incentive theory to study heretofore informal critiques of piece rate compensation schemes the informal critiques are based on the history of failed attempts to install piece rate compensation schemes at the turn of the century the formal analysis emphasizes the importance of information and commitment in contracting the main result is as follows in a work environment characterized by hidden information and a hidden action if neither the firm nor the worker can commit to future behavior then no compensation scheme piece rate or otherwise can induce the worker not to restrict output

economic production quantity models for deteriorating items with up stream full trade credit and down stream partial trade credit abstract in practice in order to reduce default risks with credit risk customers a seller e g a manufacturer or a retailer frequently requests its credit risk customers to pay a fraction of the purchase amount at the time of placing an order as collateral deposit and then grants a permissible delay on the outstanding balance i e a down stream partial trade credit by contrast the seller usually receives a permissible delay on the entire purchase amount from the supplier i e an up stream full trade credit in this paper we propose an economic production quantity epq model for deteriorating items in a supply chain with both up stream and down stream trade credit financing by using fractional programming results we can prove that the optimal solution not only exists but also is unique moreover we propose three discrimination terms to identify the optimal solution among possible alternatives finally some numerical examples are presented to highlight the theoretical results and managerial insights

the role of promotion in inducing specific human capital acquisition workers routinely carry out activities that increase their productivity with their current employer for which they are not directly compensated for example a worker may be asked to develop relationships with clients or shop floor staff or he may develop a better understanding of how his firm operates firmspecific human capital of this type is difficult to quantify so that it is likely to be difficult to directly compensate the worker for its acquisition this paper is concerned with designing compensation schemes for employees to induce them to collect nonverifiable firm specific human capital if firms develop reputations for fairly compensating workers for skill collection the vagueness of these skills may not provide a significant incentive problem i consider the case where firms do not have the opportunity to develop reputations as a result the acquisition of human capital is subject to a dual moral hazard problem first noted in kahn and huberman 1988 first a worker only collects skills if there is a promise of a higher wage if he does so second the employer has an incentive to claim that the worker has not collected these skills even when he in fact has in order to save on wage costs so on the one hand it is difficult to repay the worker after skills are collected as the firm has an incentive to renege however the worker cannot be repaid before collecting skills as he has no subsequent incentive to collect them following the institutional literature i assume that the firm can commit to a labor contract which attaches wages to different tasks the principal purpose of the paper is to show that the firm can use this ability to commit to a wage scale for different tasks to induce a worker to collect firm specific human capital in the presence of this dual moral hazard problem where the worker is rewarded for skill acquisition by promotion to another job assume that a worker can be assigned to one of two jobs d and

subjective evaluations with performance feedback this paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations their incentive role and their feedback role the paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction as long as there exists some veri able measure of performance it also shows that while subjective pay is helpful it cannot achieve full e ciency however fully e cient incentives are achievable if the rm can commit to a forced distribution of evaluations and employs a continuum of workers with a small number of workers a forced distribution is valuable only if the veri able measure is poor

endogenous verifiability and relational contracting for contracting parties it will often be uncertain whether a legal court is able to enforce the real intents of their contract the strict requirements of verifiability make it costly if not impos sible for parties to arrange their transactions and design their contract in a way that makes it completely protected by the court a way out is then to rely on self enforcing relational con tracts through repeated transactions the parties can make it costly for each other to breach the contract by letting breach ruin future trade but the self enforcing range of contracts is limited so the court s ability to enforce a contract is not without consequence for the contracting parties if possible the parties may thus have incentives to take costly actions that affect the ability of the court both ex ante preparations in terms of detailed contracting and ex post revelation of informa tion can increase the probability of fair court enforcement in this paper we focus on the former assuming that the parties are able to improve the verifiability of the contracted actions by care ful ex ante contract specifications we assume that careful contracting can improve the court s ability to verify whether an action conforms to the one described in the contract then we ask what happens to the self enforcing contract equilibrium if a party takes actions ex ante that affect the probability of verification in order to provide some answers we analyze a simple repeated principal agent game where the verifiability of the agent s actions is endogenously determined by the principal s investments in drafting an explicit contract pertaining to the quality of the agent s output the model makes it possible to identify some subtle effects of two key enforcement devices legal courts and repeated interaction note that by endogenizing verifiability we also endog enize the degree of contractual incompleteness and the equilibrium level of incompleteness will depend on the verification technology i e the resource costs that are necessary to achieve various verifiability levels this verification technology will be influenced in an essential way by the quality of courts in fact we can use the model to study relationships between two distinct aspects of courts namely their ability which influences the verification technology and their predictability which manifests itself in the equilibrium level of verifiability i e the probability with which the court in fact will verify the relevant action the repeated game approach formalizes an economic concept of trust and trustworthiness since a party honors trust if the present value of honoring exceeds the present value of abusing it the discount factor is then a proxy for the trust level in the relationship by studying the effect of variations in verification technology and the discount factor we can gain insight into the rela tionship between court ability explicit contracting trust and relational contracting below we summarize the results

endogenous institutional selection building trust and economic growth abstract private order market institutions founded on trust based relational contracts suffer adverse selection and moral hazard problems while public order market institutions have a limited capacity to enforce contracts i model agent selection between contract enforcement institutions and demonstrate that the state s contract enforcement capacity is complementary to private order contract enforcement institutions for low to moderate levels of public order enforcement capacity this suggests that initial improvements to public order institutions cause the accumulation of trust and result in economic growth in both institutions however i show that the private order institution must collapse once the public order contract enforcement capacity is too great

including sustainability criteria into inventory models research on sustainability performance has considerably enriched operations management literature in recent years however work with quantitative models is still scarce this paper contributes by revisiting classical inventory methods taking sustainability concerns into account we believe that reducing all aspects of sustainable development to a single objective is not desirable we thus reformulate the classical economic order quantity model as a multiobjective problem we refer to this model as the sustainable order quantity model then a multi echelon extension of the sustainable order quantity model is studied for both models the set of efficient solutions pareto optimal solutions is analytically characterized these results are used to provide some insights about the effectiveness of different regulatory policies to control carbon emissions we also use an interactive procedure that allows the decision maker to quickly identify the best option among these solutions the proposed interactive procedure is a new combination of multi criteria decision analysis techniques

a sustainable production inventory model for a controllable carbon emissions rate under shortages abstract carbon emissions are the key factor of global warming nowadays some countries have focused on reducing carbon emission carbon tax and cap policies are the key mechanism utilized in many countries to achieve this keeping this issue in mind a sustainable economic production quantity sepq carbon tax and cap model has considered for a controllable carbon emissions rate by investing in green technology gt efforts under different with and without shortage situations this study has three models a a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap model with no shortages b a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap with partial backordering and c a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap with full backordering with and without green technology investment a solution methodology has been proposed for determining the optimal strategies of cycle time green technology investment and the fraction period length in positive inventory level several numerical examples have studied to validate the sustainable economic production quantity models the results of this paper are a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap partial backlogging case has a better justifiable profit with the highest cycle time and the lowest value of the fraction length period as well as the lower green technology investment cost compared with other models finally sensitivity analysis has provided with the managerial implication of the optimal feasible solution with respect to some key parameters

managing carbon footprints in inventory management abstract there is a broad consensus that mankind must reduce carbon emissions to mitigate global warming it is generally accepted that carbon emission trading is one of the most effective market based mechanisms to curb the amount of carbon emissions this paper investigates how firms manage carbon footprints in inventory management under the carbon emission trading mechanism we derive the optimal order quantity and analytically and numerically examine the impacts of carbon trade carbon price and carbon cap on order decisions carbon emissions and total cost we make interesting observations from the numerical examples and provide managerial insights from the analytical results

sustainable inventory system with controllable non instantaneous deterioration and environmental emission rates abstract in today s environment it is difficult to be successful without considering sustainability the effects of global warming are becoming more observable in daily life supply chain activities are important sources of environmental emissions this effect increases concerns to control emissions through the development of a supply chain inventory model a replenishment problem based on joint pricing dynamic investment in environmental cost order cost preservation technology cost and optimal replenishment times for a non instantaneous deteriorating item is considered as a way to maximize retailer profit in this problem the demand rate depends on the stock and selling price an algorithm is used to find the optimum solution of the supply chain inventory problem which determines the selling price preservation technology investment cost environmental emission cost order cost and replenishment cycle time theoretical analysis of the optimal properties of the proposed model is provided and then solution methods are proposed numerical analysis is conducted to show the application of the model managerial implications are given to practitioner this study demonstrates that the proposed model could be applied under real world situations

environmentally responsible inventory models non classical models for a non classical era abstract mathematical models of inventory typically include the three inventory associated costs of surplus shortage and ordering these classic inventory models are then analysed so as to choose inventory parameters that usually minimise the total cost of operating the inventory system being investigated unfortunately classic inventory models do not provide a meaningful basis for analysing many real and increasingly important practical inventory problems and situations it is therefore not surprising that over recent years several authors have discussed these issues in broad terms and suggested that a new paradigm needs to be developed this paper develops some specific aspects of this discussion in particular the paper identifies a range of inventory problems that are not covered appropriately by traditional inventory analysis one of these is to design responsible inventory systems i e systems that reflect the needs of the environment the paper then examines the importance of inventory planning to the environment in greater detail for example packaging is important not only because of its costs and the protection that it provides to the inventory items but also because of its eventual effects on the environment in terms of the use of resources and potential landfill for similar reasons waste which can result from poor inventory management is highly important the location of stores is important because location affects transport costs thus the influence of the secondary aspects of most inventory models packaging waste and location are important but even more important are the inter relations with the total system in particular the location of the manufacturing plants and the effect that inventory planning has on the logistics chain potentially have considerable environmental implications inventory is part of a wider system however until the cost charged for an activity reflects the true environmental cost of that activity it is likely that decisions will be made on the basis of erroneous data in that situation we are faced with either determining the environmental cost of specific actions or to use environmental costs that are somewhat contrived in which case it may be more sensible to use very different performance measures and models the paper discusses these ideas and ways in which inventory policies may reassure us with our environmental concerns

optimal trade credit and lot size policies in economic production quantity models with learning curve production costs abstract in reality a seller e g a supplier or a manufacturer frequently offers his her buyers trade credit e g permissible delay in payment trade credit reduces the buyer s holding cost of inventory and hence attracts new buyers who consider it to be a type of price reduction on the other hand granting trade credit also increases the seller s opportunity cost i e the loss of capital opportunity during the credit period and default risk i e the event in which the buyer will be unable to make the required payments on his her debt obligation in addition it is a well known fact of learning by doing that production cost of a new product declines by a factor of from 10 to 50 percent each time the accumulated production volume doubles therefore we propose an economic production quantity model from the seller s prospective to determine his her optimal trade credit period and production lot size simultaneously in which i trade credit increases not only sales but also opportunity cost and default risk and ii production cost declines and obeys a learning curve phenomenon then the necessary and sufficient conditions to obtain the seller s optimal trade credit and order quantity are derived finally we use some numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results and to provide some managerial insights

incentives equality and contract renegotiations theory and evidence in the chinese banking industry renegotiation plays an important role in contract theory but the empirical study of renegotiation is almost non existent in the literature using a unique dataset from the chinese banking industry we find that the large majority of managerial incentive contracts are renegotiated after performances are realized we develop a model of contract renegotiation where supervisors and managers sign incentive contracts and then renegotiate them in the unique equilibrium of the model incentive contracts are almost always renegotiated ex post even though renegotiation is fully anticipated incentive contracts affect performance the predictions of the model find strong support from our empirical results

stackelberg solution in a vendor buyer supply chain model with permissible delay in payments abstract in practice vendors or sellers often offer their buyers a fixed credit period to settle the account the benefits of trade credit are not only to attract new buyers but also to avoid lasting price competition on the other hand the policy of granting a permissible delay adds not only an additional cost but also an additional dimension of default risk to vendors in this paper we will incorporate the fact that granting a permissible delay has a positive impact on demand but negative impacts on both costs and default risks to establish vendor buyer supply chain models then we will derive the necessary and sufficient conditions to obtain the optimal solution for both the vendor and the buyer under non cooperative stackelberg equilibrium finally we will use two numerical examples to show that 1 granting a permissible delay may significantly improve profits for both the vendor and the buyer 2 the sensitivity analysis on the optimal solution with respect to each parameter and 3 the comparisons between nash and stackelberg solutions

a deterministic eoq model with delays in payments and price discount offers abstract it is the purpose of this paper to model the retailer s profit maximizing strategy when confronted with supplier s trade offer of credit and price discount on the purchase of merchandise generally retailers have to face many types of demands for different kinds of goods in real situation retailers have to correlate between the selling price and supplier s trade offer keeping in mind profit maximization strategy in the proposed model all increasing deterministic demands are discussed analytically numerically and graphically in the environment of permissible delay in payment and discount offer to the retailer

lot sizing policies for deteriorating items with expiration dates and partial trade credit to credit risk customers abstract in practice a credit worthy retailer frequently receives a permissible delay on the entire purchase amount without collateral deposits from his her supplier i e an up stream full trade credit by contrast a retailer usually requests his her credit risk customers to pay a fraction of the purchase amount at the time of placing an order and then grants a permissible delay on the remaining balance i e a down stream partial trade credit in addition many products such as blood banks pharmaceuticals fruits vegetables volatile liquids and others deteriorate constantly and have their expiration dates however not many researchers have taken the expiration date of a deteriorating item into consideration the purpose of this paper is to establish optimal lot sizing policies for a retailer who sells a deteriorating item to credit risk customers by offering partial trade credit to reduce his her risk the proposed model is a generalized case of many previous models by applying theorems in pseudo convex fractional functions we can easily prove that the optimal solution not only exists but is also unique moreover we propose three discrimination terms which can easily identify the optimal solution among all possible alternatives finally some numerical examples are presented to highlight the theoretical results and managerial insights

sustainable trade credit and replenishment decisions with credit linked demand under carbon emission constraints abstract in this paper we consider issues of sustainability in the context of joint trade credit and inventory management in which the demand depends on the length of the credit period offered by the retailer to its customers we quantify the impacts of the credit period and environmental regulations on the inventory model starting with some mild assumptions we first analyze the model with generalized demand and default risk rates under the carbon cap and trade policy and then we make some extensions to the model with the carbon offset policy we further analytically examine the effects of carbon emission parameters on the retailer s trade credit and replenishment strategies finally a couple of numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are given to illustrate the features of the proposed model which is followed by concluding remarks

multi item production planning with carbon cap and trade mechanism abstract carbon emission control becomes a challenge in recent years and carbon emission trading is an effective way to curb carbon emission this paper investigates the multi item production planning problem with carbon cap and trade mechanism in which a firm uses a common capacity and carbon emission quota to produce multiple products for fulfilling independent stochastic demands and the firm can buy or sell the right to emit carbon on a trading market of carbon emission a profit maximization model is proposed to characterize the optimization problem the optimal policy of production and carbon trading decisions is analyzed and an efficient solution method with linear computational complexity is presented for solving the optimal solution the impacts of carbon price carbon cap on the shadow price of the common capacity production decisions carbon emission and the total profit are investigated the comparisons of the carbon cap and trade policy and the taxation policy are given to show the effectiveness of the policies numerical analyses are presented for illustrating our findings and obtaining some managerial insights and policy implication

implicit contracts incentive compatibility and involuntary unemployment this paper considers the enforceability of employment contracts when employees performance cannot be verified in court so that piece rate contracts are not legally enforceable part i shows that there exists a variety of self enforcing implicit contracts modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and characterizes all the wage and performance outcomes that can be implemented implementation requires a strictly positive surplus from employment the form of the contract depending on how this surplus is divided between firm and employee piece rate contracts and contracts with an informally agreed bonus can be made self enforcing but the use of severance pay and bonding does not extend the set of implementable allocations the resulting contracts resemble actual labor contracts more than do the contracts in standard principal agent models part ii analyses market equilibrium with these contracts also modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and shows that many such equilibria exist unfilled vacancies and unemployed workers can co exist despite the existence of contracts that are potentially mutually beneficial for those jobs that are filled any division of the potential surplus is possible so that the market can have at the same time involuntary unemployment and vacancies that are unfilled despite filled jobs earning positive profits as a criterion for selecting equilibria a notion of renegotiation proofness is applied then either all workers are employed or all jobs filled but any division of the potential surplus is still possible the paper explores what further restrictions on beliefs give rise to a walrasian outcome in which all the potential surplus goes to the short side of the market and to an efficiency wage type outcome in which the potential surplus goes to the long side

retailer s optimal replenishment decisions with credit linked demand under permissible delay in payments abstract usually it is assumed that the supplier would offer a fixed credit period to the retailer but the retailer in turn would not offer any credit period to its customers which is unrealistic because in real practice retailer might offer a credit period to its customers in order to stimulate his own demand moreover it is observed that credit period offered by the retailer to its customers has a positive impact on demand of an item but the impact of credit period on demand has received a very little attention by the researchers to incorporate this phenomenon we assume that demand is linked to credit period offered by the retailer to the customers this paper incorporates the concept of credit linked demand and develops a new inventory model under two levels of trade credit policy to reflect the real life situations an easy to use algorithm is developed to determine the optimal credit as well as replenishment policy jointly for the retailer finally numerical example is presented to illustrate the theoretical results followed by the sensitivity of various parameters on the optimal solution

a matter of relational style loan officer consistency and exchange continuity in microfinance social scientists have long considered what mechanisms underlie repeated exchange three mechanisms have garnered the majority of this attention formal contracts relational contracts and relationally embedded social ties although each mechanism has its virtues all three exhibit a common limitation an inability to fully explain the continuation and stability of intertemporal exchange between individuals and organizations in the face of change drawing on extensive quantitative data on approximately 450 000 microfinance loans made by a microfinance institution in mexico from 2004 to 2008 that include random assignment of loan officers this research proposes the concept of relational styles to help explain how repeated exchange is possible in the face of personnel change we define relational styles as systematically reoccurring patterns of interaction employed by social actors within and across exchange relationships in this paper between microfinance clients and loan officers we show that relati

integrated economic and environmental models for a multi stage cold supply chain under carbon tax regulation abstract the elevated level of public and organizations awareness concerning sustainability has necessitated the adoption of environmentally conscious practices in the management of supply chains as such classical inventory models wherein the sole measure of performance is cost minimization are no longer appropriate to handle such emerging and pressing issue this paper assesses the impact of accounting for carbon emissions resulting from transportation and storage activities of a cold item in the context of a multi stage supply chain comprised of a plant warehouse a distribution center dc and a retailer we present an operational cost minimization model a carbon footprint minimization model and a hybrid economic and environmental minimization model where all models seek to determine the optimal lot sizing and shipping quantities alongside the number of trucks to be used in the upstream and downstream directions of the supply chain as well as the number of freezer units utilized at the dc which is owned by a third party logistics provider the structural properties for the optimal solution of the three models are identified and solution algorithms are also proposed upon conducting computational experiments it turns out that the incorporation of carbon related costs through carbon tax regulation may call for adjusting the adopted operational policy which results in a minor increase in the operational cost however this increase is outweighed by the savings resulting from the carbon related costs numerical results of the sensitivity analysis on the carbon tax policy indicate that as the tax rate increases substantial reductions in the amount of carbon footprint emitted are realized and cost savings are also achieved when adopting the lot sizing and shipping policy of the third integrated model over the operational cost minimization model

does competition kill corruption corrupt agents officials or gangsters exact money from firms corruption affects the number of firms in a free entry equilibrium the degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures increases in competition may not lower corruption the model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm to exit assessing the welfare effect of corruption is complicated by the fact that exit caused by corruption does not necessarily reduce social welfare