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

on the structure of lost sales inventory models we provide a new approach to the structural analysis of the standard lost sales inventory system this approach is we think easier to work with than the original one we also derive new bounds on the optimal policy then we show that more variable demand leads to higher cost finally we extend the analysis to several important variations of the basic model

retail pricing and clearance sales sellers of new products are faced with having to guess demand conditions to set price appropriately but sellers are able to adjustprice over time and to learn from past mistakes additionally it is not necessary that all goods be sold with certainty it is sometimes better to set a high price and to risk no sale this process is modeledto explain retail pricing behavior and the time distribution of transactions prices start high and fall as a function of time on theshelf the initial price and rate of decline can be predicted and depends on thinness of the market the proportion of customers who are window shoppers and other observable characteristics copyright 1986 by american economic association

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

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

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

firm specific effects on location decisions of foreign direct investment in china s logistics industry hong j 2007 firm specific effects on location decisions of foreign direct investment in china s logistics industry regional studies 41 673 683 this paper uses conditional logit models to investigate firms specific effects on location decisions of foreign direct investment in china s logistics industry based on a recent census database the empirical results indicate that the importance of some location factors varies with firm characteristics small logistics firms are more sensitive to labour cost than large companies compared with independent firms branch companies are less responsive to local market demand and labour factors wholly owned foreign firms prefer cities with cheap labour while joint ventures put more emphasis on local market demand investors from hong kong macao and taiwan value local market size while those from foreign countries emphasize cheap labour and convenient airway transport location determinants also vary over time and differ across sectors implications for resear

cultural influence on the development of accounting systems internationally a test of gray s 1988 theory this paper attempts to test the theory developed by gray 1988 linking accounting values and systems with hofstede s 1980 cultural constructs based on data from twenty nine countries it finds that while gray s 1988 model has statistically significant explanatory power it is best at explaining actual financial reporting practices and is relatively weak in explaining extant professional and regulatory structures from a cultural base this paper further finds that both the development of financial markets and levels of taxation enhance the explanations offered by gray 1988

international technology transfer in services this study examines the nature of technology and the process of its transfer in five service industries from parent companies to foreign affiliates three principal research questions are posed what is the key technology in each industry what are the main methods for transferring this technology how and why do technology and transfer methods differ across firms industries and countries the empirical analysis shows that key technologies were generally knowledge of experience in the industry and methodology for producing the service transfer of the technology was mainly done through the training and transfer of experts and organizational forms were wholly owned subsidiaries and international partnerships more technology transfer occurred when firms were more international when affiliates were more recently established and when parent ownership was lower in the affiliate some evidence exists that more firm specific jointly produced technology leads to higher ownership percentage and greater transfer to affiliates

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

choice of foreign market entry mode impact of ownership location and internalization factors firms interested in servicing foreign markets face a difficult decision with regards to the choice of an entry mode the options available to a firm include exporting licensing joint venture and sole venture several factors that determine the choice of a specific foreign market entry mode have been identified in previous literature these factors can be classified into three categories ownership advantages of a firm location advantages of a market and internalization advantages of integrating transactions this study examines the independent and joint influences of these factors on the choice of an entry mode multinomial logistic regression model is employed to test the hypothesized effects

an organizational model for understanding internationalization processes we propose an organizational model for understanding internationalization processes we argue that these processes differ with the type of organization we compare the internationalization processes of three organization types the mass production organization the disaggregated production organization and the project based organization each organization type responds differently to critical elements of the internationalization process namely the focus of entry the degree of presence and physical presence requirements in the foreign market which in turn influence what modal forms are adopted as the process progresses consequently we observe different approaches to resource commitment in the foreign market over time

a three stage theory of international expansion the link between multinationality and performance in the service sector it is generally assumed that the performance of a firm improves with greater multinationality yet recent empirical studies have shown both a u shaped relationship which suggests an initially negative effect of international expansion on performance before the positive returns of international expansion are realized and an inverted u shaped relationship which suggests that international expansion beyond an optimal level is again detrimental to performance and results in a negative slope this paper proposes a new unified three stage theory of international expansion that incorporates both concepts in a sigmoid hypothesis it then tests this on data from 11 service industries highlighting the difference between knowledge based and capital intensive service sectors

perspectives on the sources of heterogeneity in indian industry abstract this paper examines technical efficiency variation across four industrial sectors in india using a stochastic production frontier technique the results obtained are comparable to technical efficiency distribution patterns obtained in other countries heterogeneity in firm level efficiency is examined against internal firm level and external industry and location characteristics the results suggest that managerial effectiveness significantly influences efficiency and that there are considerable benefits deriving from location within established industrial clusters for particular industries the methodology and findings indicate that the study of industry specific technical efficiency patterns is a useful analytic tool for tracking firm response to ongoing liberalization

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

control modes in international service operations the propensity to franchise what determines a service firm s organizational choice between equity based control and franchising this question which has elicited some theoretical answers and a few empirical tests in a domestic setting has never been addressed in an international context before this study explains the mode of control chosen in terms of a theoretical framework which borrows from agency theory and transaction cost analysis the propensity to franchise internationally was found to be directly related to i monitoring costs associated with geographical and cultural distance between the principal franchisor and its foreign agents franchisees ii the principal s international experience and iii the degree of host countries contextual uncertainty but inversely related to the service firm level of brand name asset specificity

economies of scale in services a study of multinational insurers this study investigates whether multinational insurers achieve economies of scale using a time series cross sectional design it analyzes the relationship between expenses and output of multinational insurers the study finds that multinational insurers achieve economies of scale only up to a point and rather than benefitting from scale the most internationally diverse insurers suffer diseconomies the conclusion is that the benefits of extensive foreign acquisitions by insurers are questionable

determinants of foreign investment of u s advertising agencies this paper investigates the impact of several factors on the foreign investment of u s advertising agencies by using the theories on the determinants of foreign direct investment by manufacturing firms for the two years examined the hypotheses about the impact of host country market size host country geographic proximity firm size firm s international operations experience oligopolistic reaction and presence of home country customers abroad are all confirmed this paper also investigates the impact of oligopolistic reaction among the top ten and the second ten largest agencies and finds a stronger impact for the former

separable but not equal the location determinants of discrete services offshoring activities in this paper we explore the question of why firms offshore particular services to specific geographic locations we draw on research related to the unique characteristics of services in trade and commerce and more recent analyses of the transnational unbundling and spatial dispersion of business processes we move beyond a simple assessment of the cost sensitivity or relative sophistication of offshoring services and develop a typology emphasizing the degree to which offshoring services activities are interactive repetitive or innovative we suggest that the location of offshoring projects will depend on the particular mix of these attributes and test this assertion using a data set of 595 export oriented offshore services projects initiated from 2002 to 2005 by us and uk company parents in 45 developed and developing countries we find that offshore location choices greatly depend on these services characteristics and in sometimes surprising ways and draw implications from our findings for international business theory policy and practice

international banks as leaders or followers of international business an historical perspective abstract international banking and international trade have been partners since the beginning of world trade and world finance indeed the distinction between international trade and international finance as two separate functions and institutions is relatively recent banks and business firms are two parts of a world network therefore there is no easy answer to the question as to whether banks follow or lead international business it is probable that where banks are aggressive in building world networks and industries focus on single projects banks lead and industry follows but under the opposite conditions the roles will reverse there is no way to determine which of the two processes is dominant

the experience factor in foreign market entry behavior of service firms the paper examines the effect of international experience on service firms selection of foreign markets and entry modes the investigation utilizes survey date from 151 united states based service firms results on market selection suggest that as their experience increases and becomes geographically more diversified service firms tend to choose markets that are culturally less similar to their home country on entry mode choice the paper departs from traditional linear conceptualizations and hypothesizes a u shaped relationship between experience and propensity for integrated entry modes results generally support the hypothesis the paper explains these findings and describes how service firms resemble and differ from manufacturing firms in their foreign market entry behavior

the determinants of foreign direct investment in services this paper has two main objectives first to consider country specific determinants that attract services fdi and second to compare the importance of these determinants vis a vis traditional determinants that attract manufacturing fdi using oecd countries as our sample and 1980 to 2003 as our time period we consider the determinants of inward fdi in a panel setting our results provide empirical evidence to support the view that no new theories may be necessary to explain the determinants of services fdi

censored regression estimation under unobserved heterogeneity a stochastic parameter approach this article presents a methodology for addressing the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in the context of regression models based on censored samples the effectiveness feasibility and usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated by means of an empirical application as well as a simulation experiment the article demonstrates that censored regressions that control for the presence of unobserved heterogeneity perform substantially better in comparison to their counterparts in which the problem of unobserved heterogeneity is ignored

location specificity and the transferability of downstream assets to foreign subsidiaries we investigate the effect of firm specific advantages being local in scope and the influence of subsequent location specific disadvantages on the choice of foreign entry mode and subsidiary performance to look into this issue we examine japanese fdi data from the wholesale and retail industries two sectors that have productive activity concentrated in downstream processes and location bound resources our theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate that in situations where required capabilities must be developed through local experience and where location specific resources were subject to market failure acquisition and joint venture strategies were preferred greenfield entries were successful in industries that permitted the offsetting of location specific disadvantages with firm specific advantages from our results we draw implications for the entry mode literature and offer a perspective on the performance of the entry mode choice

two stage perishable inventory models in this paper we consider perishable inventory systems with two types of demand demand may be for either fresh items or for somewhat older items we model the system with two inventory stages the first stage holds fresh items and the second stage holds the older items we approximate the performance of the two stage inventory system and compare two managerial policies

on the optimal policy structure in serial inventory systems with lost sales we study a periodically reviewed serial inventory system in which excess demand from external customers is lost we derive elementary properties of the vector of optimal order quantities in this system in particular we derive bounds on the sensitivity or more mathematically the derivative of the optimal order quantity at each stage to the vector of the current inventory levels our analysis uses the concept of l natural convexity which was studied in discrete convex analysis and recently used in the study of single stage inventory systems with lost sales we also remark on how our analysis extends to models with capacity constraints and or backordering

optimal ordering and pricing policy for demand functions that are separable into price and inventory age abstract we formulate and analyze two models for determining the optimal pricing order quantity and replenishment period for items whose demand function is separable into components of price and inventory age the first model assumes a multiplicative demand function we provide conditions which are satisfied by most common price dependent demand functions to reduce the three variable profit maximization problem into a single variable problem which can be solved using an efficient line search method next we show that a genuine additive model cannot exist and instead suggest and analyze a pseudo additive model however this model is more limited than the multiplicative model in its ability to incorporate various combinations of price and inventory age effects and reduction of the maximization problem into a single variable problem is more complicated except in the case of a linear price effect which is further analyzed for both models we show that the optimal solution satisfies the first order condition for equilibrium under a monopoly with a modification that includes inventory holding costs we solve numerical examples to illustrate the solution procedures

should retailers hold a perishable product having different ages the case of a homogeneous market and multiplicative demand model this paper specializes in investigating the common practice of the coexistence of multiple competing perishables each with different age and price all of which are associated with the same product the fundamental postulate investigated by our model is the replacement of the policy of selling a single product age with a policy of selling multiple product ages coexistence of multiple product ages on the shelf is associated with shorter cycle lengths as well as with providing consumers with the option of choosing between a fresher product on average and a cheaper product on average we use a utility corresponding to the factors of price and time we axiomatically assume the coexistence of multiple product ages while posing several propositions which present certain difficulties in preferring this policy with the support of a multiplicative demand with respect to price and time and by assuming that consumers are homogeneous in their preferences we analyze a deterministic version of the problem and derive the optimal pricing policy given any cycle length and any duration for which both types coexist on the shelf we prove that the optimal policy is not to sell multiple product types at all by means of a numerical example we show that the operational mode of the coexistence of multiple product ages reduces the retailer s profit per unit time by at least 15 sensitivity analysis of some of the most influential parameters is introduced the superiority of the single product age operational mode over the competitor mode sharply decreases as the optimal cycle length is approached

internalization and experience japanese banks international expansion 1980 1998 we use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate multinational banks foreign activities we bridge core concepts from the stages theory of internationalization to internalization theory to extend the literature on the defensive expansion hypothesis unlike the primarily aggregate levels of analysis employed in previous research on multinational banking we utilize a firm level analysis of the internationalization experiences of 21 japanese banks in the period 1980 1998 we find that banks undertake foreign direct investment to secure internalization benefits by following their existing clients and to achieve economies of scale in the application of their intangible assets in international markets the magnitude of these relationships however is contingent upon the level of a bank s experience in the host countries consistent with predictions from internationalization theory we find that the motivations for international expansion can change over time

an elasticity approach to the newsvendor with price sensitive demand we introduce a measure of elasticity of stochastic demand called the elasticity of the lost sales rate which offers a unifying perspective on the well known newsvendor with pricing problem this new concept provides a framework to characterize structural results for coordinated and uncoordinated pricing and inventory strategies concavity and submodularity of the profit function as well as sensitivity properties of the optimal inventory and price policies are characterized by monotonicity conditions or bounds on the elasticity of the lost sales rate these elasticity conditions are satisfied by most relevant demand models in the marketing and operations literature our results unify and complement previous work on price setting newsvendor models and provide a new tool for researchers modeling stochastic price sensitive demand in other contexts

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

multinational corporation internationalization in the service sector a study of japanese trading companies this paper extends chang s 1995 sequential investment theory to include multinational corporations mncs in service industries given this sector s large and growing impact on the global economy to facilitate an examination of service mnc internationalization patterns we develop a new typology of service investment i e core global related local unrelated global and unrelated local based on business relatedness and location specificity we test this typology on a sample of large japanese trading companies our results suggest that the initial investments of service mncs are closely related to their core businesses and are less location specific but that subsequent investments are less related to firms core services and are more location specific a pattern similar to the traditional view on manufacturing mncs we extend our analysis to examine several case studies to provide a richer context for these findings in addition we examine the performance implications of internationalization our findings suggest that firms that internationalize through early investments that are closely related to their core activities outperform those in unrelated businesses over time but that this performance gap between related and unrelated foreign investments diminishes in more advanced stages of internationalization

political aspects of mne theory political behavior by mnes has usually been ignored downplayed or passively treated in dominant economic models of the multinational enterprise in order to remedy this lacuna dunning s eclectic paradigm is expanded to integrate political dimensions in the analysis of ownership internalization and location advantages

s s optimality in joint inventory pricing control an alternate approach we study a stationary single stage inventory system under periodic review with fixed ordering costs and multiple sales levers such as pricing advertising etc we show the optimality of s s type policies in these settings under both the backordering and lost sales assumptions our analysis is constructive and is based on a condition that we identify as being key to proving the s s structure this condition is entirely based on the single period profit function and the demand model our optimality results complement the existing results in this area

efficient algorithms for the dynamic pricing problem with reference price effect we analyze a finite horizon dynamic pricing model in which demand at each period depends on not only the current price but also past prices through reference prices a unique feature but also a significant challenge in this model is the asymmetry in reference price effect which implies that the underlying optimization problem is nonsmooth and no standard optimization methods can be applied we identify a few key structural properties of the problem which enable us to develop strongly polynomial time algorithms to compute the optimal prices for several plausible scenarios we complement our exact algorithms by proposing an approximation heuristic and provide an upper bound on the optimal objective value finally we conduct numerical experiments to study the optimal price path and demonstrate the value of dynamic pricing when demands are seasonal we further compare numerically one of the exact algorithms with the heuristic and offer managerial suggestions this paper was accepted by yinyu ye optimization

the duration of international joint ventures an foreign wholly owned subsidiaries an international joint venture is formed when the partners contribute different benefits to the venture each party learns from the others through the joint venture however the literature suggests that joint ventures are unstable so it is hypothesized that on average an international joint venture will have a shorter duration than a foreign wholly owned subsidiary data on us foreign direct investment fdi abroad and fdi in the united states are applied to test the instability of joint ventures the proportional hazards model is applied while exponential distribution and weibull distribution are used to cross check the results on the whole the results are consistent with the hypothesis in particular the two types of us affiliates are significantly different in duration although the support for the hypothesis from fdi in the united states is weak

technical note optimal dynamic joint inventory pricing control for multiplicative demand with fixed order costs and lost sales this note studies the optimal dynamic decision making problem for a retailer in a price sensitive multiplicative demand framework our model incorporates lost sales holding cost fixed and variable procurement costs as well as salvage value we characterize the structure of the retailer s discounted expected profit maximizing dynamic inventory policy for both finite and infinite selling horizon problems

perishable inventory control with two types of customers and different selling prices under the warehouse capacity constraint abstract this paper discusses an inventory model for a single perishable product with two types of customers high priority and low priority ones the former buys only the newest commodity while the latter buys either one whether the newest or not different selling prices reflecting the remaining lifetime of commodity and the constraint of the warehouse capacity i e the capacity of own warehouse and so the excess inventory are stored in the rental warehouse further demands in successive periods are assumed to be independent nonnegative random variables with known distribution functions and high priority and low priority demands are independent stock is depleted by high priority demand first and then low priority demand using fifo issuing policy assuming two types of shortage costs different selling prices outdating cost purchasing cost two types of holding costs an optimal ordering policy to maximize the expected profit is derived

ordering and pricing of service products in an advance sales system with price dependent demand this investigation addresses a service inventory control problem in which a firm orders and sells a service which will be used or consumed by customers on a specific future date the firm sells the product through an advance booking system aiming to optimize product price to maximize the total expected profit considering situations in which product demand is price dependent and customers with reservations may cancel advance orders this work develops a continuous time model to simultaneously determine the order quantity and selling prices the analytical results reveal that the optimal ordering quantity and prices are derived via closed form solutions in addition sensitivity analysis of the optimal prices with respect to the system parameters is also conducted to illustrate optimal decision characteristics

firm size and technical efficiency applications of production frontiers to indian survey data abstract this paper is an empirical investigation of the relationship between relative technical efficiency and firm size in four indian manufacturing industries a frontier translog production function is used to derive measures of technical inefficiency at the enterprise level given the properties of the estimated production frontier these indices of technical efficiency are also indices of total factor productivity tfp which is the single most widely accepted measure of productive efficiency variations in technical efficiency are correlated with several explanatory variables including size of firm firm size is found to be positively associated with relative productive efficiency in only one of the four industries

patterns in the expansion of u s banks foreign operations combining foreign direct investment theory with data on 32 countries from the federal reserve board we examined u s banks patterns of foreign operations including their levels of banking services and choice of organizational forms in host countries results generally supported predictions but only in developed countries the lack of support in rapidly growing markets of asia and latin america raises serious theoretical concerns and presents fresh research opportunities into the global banking industry

coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies with random demand and fixed ordering cost the finite horizon case we analyze a finite horizon single product periodic review model in which pricing and production inventory decisions are made simultaneously demands in different periods are random variables that are independent of each other and their distributions depend on the product price pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged ordering cost includes both a fixed cost and a variable cost proportional to the amount ordered the objective is to find an inventory policy and a pricing strategy maximizing expected profit over the finite horizon we show that when the demand model is additive the profit to go functions arek concave and hence an s s p policy is optimal in such a policy the period inventory is managed based on the classical s s policy and price is determined based on the inventory position at the beginning of each period for more general demand functions i e multiplicative plus additive functions we demonstrate that the profit to go function is not necessarilyk concave and an s s p policy is not necessarily optimal we introduce a new concept the symmetrick concave functions and apply it to provide a characterization of the optimal policy

technical note a note on the structure of joint inventory pricing control with leadtimes we consider a joint inventory pricing control problem for a periodic review single stage inventory system with a positive order leadtime and a linear order cost demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the price in accordance with a stochastic demand function of additive form pricing and ordering decisions are made simultaneously at the beginning of each period the objective is to maximize the total expected discounted profit over a finite horizon we partially characterize the structure of the optimal joint ordering and pricing policies we also show that our structural analysis can be extended to a multistage or serial inventory system with constant or stochastic leadtimes and an assemble to order system with price sensitive demand

service multinationals conceptualization measurement and theory the application of mne definitions measurements and theories to international services is still in its infancy despite the considerable size and growth of this sector there are problems in defining classifying measuring comparing and explaining service mnes but they do not require special definitions and theories still research to date suggests 1 delinking the concepts of multinational enterprise and foreign direct investment under certain conditions and 2 qualifying the nature of ownership internalization and location advantages in fdi theory as far as service mnes are concerned

agglomeration economies and productivity in indian industry abstract the primary objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which agglomeration economies contribute to economic productivity we distinguish three sources of agglomeration economies 1 at the firm level from improved access to market centers 2 at the industry level from intra industry localization economies and 3 at the regional level from inter industry urbanization economies there is considerable variation in the sources and magnitudes of agglomeration economies between industrial sectors in particular our results indicate that access to markets through improvements in inter regional infrastructure is an important determinant of firm level productivity whereas benefits of locating in dense urban areas do not appear to offset associated costs

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

the relationship between international diversification and performance in service firms international diversification is a growth strategy that has a major potential impact on firm performance the relationship between international diversification and firm performance has been extensively studied in the international strategy literature a major gap in the literature has been the non existence of studies that have examined the effect of international diversification on performance in service firms previous studies that have tested the international diversification performance relationship were based on samples of manufacturing firms we argue that the form of the relationship between multinationality and performance is different in service firms we provide a theoretical argument for this claim and hypothesize that there is a u shaped curvilinear relationship between multinationality and performance in service firms our sample consists of 81 major german service firms spanning across four industries results show that there is support for a u shaped curvilinear relationship based on the findings implications and directions for future research are provided

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

india s manufactured exports comparative structure and prospects abstract the technological structure of export matters for their growth learning and path dependence mean that structures are difficult to change as technologies evolve trade liberalization per se is insufficient countries need to upgrade domestic skill and technology and attract sophisticated foreign direct investment fdi to dynamise their export structures a comparative analysis of indian manufactured exports suggests that their structure and positioning are not suited to sustained growth the base for rapid structural change through fdi or domestic capabilities is weak the current export slowdown in india reflects external conditions and may end soon however this does not assure rapid future growth

dynamic pricing in the presence of inventory considerations research overview current practices and future directions the benefits of dynamic pricing methods have long been known in industries such as airlines hotels and electric utilities where the capacity is fixed in the short term and perishable in recent years there has been an increasing adoption of dynamic pricing policies in retail and other industries where the sellers have the ability to store inventory three factors contributed to this phenomenon 1 the increased availability of demand data 2 the ease of changing prices due to new technologies and 3 the availability of decision support tools for analyzing demand data and for dynamic pricing this paper constitutes a review of the literature and current practices in dynamic pricing given its applicability in most markets and its increasing adoption in practice our focus is on dynamic intertemporal pricing in the presence of inventory considerations

the globalization of service multinationals in the triad regions japan western europe and north america in this study we empirically investigate the determinants of foreign direct investment of service multinationals based in the triad regions japan western europe and north america foreign investment decisions of 168 of the largest service firms in nine service industries over the period 1976 1986 are analyzed and hypotheses that are developed based on findings of manufacturing fdi and studies of single service industries are tested using a logistic regression model the applicability of the mne fdi theories to service mnes is tested empirically over a broad range of mne home countries and service industries differences in the international behavior of service mnes based in different countries are uncovered and analyzed