improving supply chain performance and managing risk under weather related demand uncertainty we consider a manufacturer retailer supply chain for a seasonal product whose demand is weather sensitive the retailer orders from the manufacturer supplier prior to the selling season and then sells to the market we examine how a manufacturer can structure a weather linked rebate to improve his expected profit the proposed class of rebate contracts offers several advantages over many other contract structures including no required verification of leftover inventory and or markdown amounts and no adverse effect on sales effort by the retailer we provide a thorough analysis of the manufacturer s and retailer s decisions in this context we show that the weather linked rebate can take many different forms and this flexibility allows the supplier to design contracts that are pareto improving and or limit his risk in offering the contract and the retailer s risk in accepting it for weather rebates with certain characteristics the manufacturer can fully hedge his risks of offering a weather rebate by paying a risk premium we show how this can be accomplished we also show that the basic structural results extend to settings in which the two parties would like to limit their risk

why are there so many long term sick in britain this paper examines the upward trend of numbers in receipt of invalidity benefit the major contributory benefit for the long term sick in britain since 1971 possible explanations include the rising level of unemployment through much of the period the heightened link between ill health and early retirement changes in the real level of benefits and changes in the composition of the workforce these possibilities are examined using a variety of methodologies time series cross section and fixed effects models copyright 1991 by royal economic society

patterns and trends in local pay in great britain 1975 76 to 1987 88 whilst local pay differentials lie at the heart of most models of local labour markets not enough is known about the size and trends of such differentials in great britain this study is based on a new data set derived from inland revenue and department of social security statistics for a 1 per cent sample of national insurance records the information was available at the detailed local labour market area level annually from 1975 76 to 1987 88 disaggregated by sex age industry and for women marital status the data showed a marked widening of local pay differentials in the late 1980s much of the cross sectional variation reflected a differential between greater london and the rest of the country partly reflected in house prices the trend towards increasing local pay differentials over time was still in evidence however even when labour markets in the south east were excluded from the sample

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

job matching in connected regional and occupational labour markets job mobility equilibrates disparities in local labour markets and influences the job matching efficiency we specify a matching function with regional occupational and combined regional occupation

the impact of sharing customer returns information in a supply chain with and without a buyback policy in this paper we examine a single period problem in a supply chain in which a stackelberg manufacturer supplies a product to a retailer who faces customer returns and demand uncertainty we show that the manufacturer incurs a significant profit loss with and without a buyback policy if it fails to account for customer returns in the wholesale price decision under the assumption that the retailer is better informed than the manufacturer on customer returns information we show that without a buyback policy the retailer prefers not to share if the manufacturer overestimates while it prefers to share customer returns information if the manufacturer underestimates this information if the manufacturer offers a buyback policy we have the opposite results we also discuss incentives to share the customer returns information and some of the issues that are raised in sharing this information

immigration and prices this paper examines the behavior of prices following the unexpected arrival of a large number of immigrants from the former soviet union fsu to israel during 1990 i use store level price data on 915 consumer price index products to show that the increase in aggregate demand prompted by the arrival of the fsu immigration significantly reduced prices during 1990 when one controls for native population size and city and month effects a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants to natives in a city decreases prices by 0 5 percentage point on average it is argued that this negative immigration effect is consistent with fsu immigrants the new consumers having higher price elasticities and lower search costs than the native population thus immigration can have a moderating effect on inflation through its direct effect on product markets and not only by increasing the supply of labor

the impact of customer returns on pricing and order decisions abstract in this paper we address the simultaneous determination of price and inventory replenishment when customers return product to the firm we examine cases when the quantity of returned product is a function of both the quantity sold and the price in single and multi period problems with and without uncertainty in demand we derive results for optimal prices and order quantities and discuss how the firm should change price and inventory quantities in order to mitigate the negative effects of returns from customers

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

coordinating a decentralized supply chain with customer returns and price dependent stochastic demand using a buyback policy abstract we investigate a decentralized supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer where the retailer simultaneously determines the retail price and order quantity while experiencing customer returns and price dependent stochastic demand we propose an agreement between the manufacturer and the retailer that includes two buyback prices one for unsold inventory and a second for customer returns and show that this type of easy to implement agreement can achieve perfect supply chain coordination and be a win win for both manufacturer and retailer when a complementary profit sharing agreement is included

optimal procurement contracts with pre project planning the paper studies procurement contracts with pre project investigations in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard to model the procurer s problem we extend a standard sequential screening model to endogenous information acquisition with moral hazard the optimal contract displays system atic distortions in information acquisition due to a rent effect adverse selection induces too much infor mation acquisition to prevent cost overruns and too little information acquisition to prevent false project cancellations moral hazard mitigates the distortions related to cost overruns yet exacerbates those related to false negatives the optimal mechanism is a menu of option contracts that achieves the dual goal of providing incentives for information acquisition and truthful information revelation

labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries boschma r eriksson r h and lindgren u labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries regional studies this study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows in particular it tests for the importance of labour mobility across so called skill related industries between 435 four digit industries within 72 swedish functional regions 1998 2002 both the fixed effect models and generalized method of moments gmm estimates demonstrate that a strong intensity of intra regional labour flows between skill related industries impacts positively on regional productivity growth but less so on employment growth labour mobility between unrelated industries tends to dampen regional unemployment growth while a high degree of intra industry labour flows is only found to be associated with rising unemployment

the dynamics of agglomeration externalities along the life cycle of industries neffke f henning m boschma r lundquist k j and olander l o the dynamics of agglomeration externalities along the life cycle of industries regional studies this paper investigates the changing roles of agglomeration externalities along the industry life cycle it is argued that industries have different agglomeration needs in different stages of their life cycles because their mode of competition innovation intensity and learning opportunities change over time for twelve swedish manufacturing industries it is determined for each year between 1974 and 2004 whether the industry is in a young intermediate or mature stage whereas marshall arrow romer mar externalities steadily increase with the maturity of industries the effects of local diversity jacobs externalities are positive for young industries but decline and even become negative for more mature industries neffke f henning m boschma r lundquist k j et olander l o la dynamique des effets externes d agglomeration tout

the decline in male labor force participation comment in an article in thisjournal parsons 1980a analyzes the doubling in the rate of nonparticipation in the labor force of older men since 1946 using cross sectional data from the national longitudinal survey parnes et al 1970 in an index function model of the labor force participation decision he tests the assertion that the withdrawal of older males is attributable to the rapid expansion of alternatives to work provided by the social security disability insurance ssdi program he reports an elasticity of nonparticipation with respect to the replacement rate of ssdi benefits of 631 and concludes that the recent decline in labor force participation can be largely explained by the increased generosity of social welfare transfers particularly social security disability payments p 130 the magnitude of parsons s estimate and its impact on the public debate over disability transfer policy require careful scrutiny of its basis in section i we describe parsons s econometric model and construction of variables in section ii we provide a critique in section iii we test the robustness of parsons s elasticity estimate by presenting alternative estimates based on corrections and extensions of his basic model section iv concludes

panel estimates of the determinants of british regional male incapacity benefits rolls 1998 2006 this article explores the determinants of the proportion of the working age male population claiming incapacity benefits ib across the 11 british government office regions for the period 1998 to 2006 three different approaches are adopted to modelling register dynamics first treating ib stocks as if they were trend stationary albeit with persistence and estimating reduced form models for their logs second treating ib stocks as if they were nonstationary and examining their long run determinants plus short run equilibrium reversion properties third focusing on the determinants of gross inflows and outflows that together drive ib stocks given the nature of the data no approach is ideal yet the models provide reasonably robust evidence that labour market changes specifically falling unemployment rates and rising real earnings have contributed to falling male ib stocks over the period

why is production more volatile than sales theory and evidence on the stockout avoidance motive for inventory holding this paper argues that the macroeconomically interesting features of inventory behavior are well captured by a model in which firms face only demand uncertainty with a nonnegativity constraint on inventories empirical implications of the stockout avoidance model of inventory behavior are derived and then tested on disaggregated automobile industry data the results largely support the model though they suggest a small role for production smoothing as well subsidiary evidence on the relative variance of demand and cost shocks suggests that demand shocks are indeed more important

demand uncertainty and supplier s returns policies for a multi store style good retailer abstract as demand uncertainty grows in the marketplace a critical issue today in most purchase contract negotiations between an independent retailer of a style good and its supplier is the provision of a returns policy i e a commitment by the supplier to buy back unsold inventory of the good at the end of its selling season management science research on the strategic role and optimal design of returns policies has grown in recent years but so far offers little treatment of how exactly the retailer s optimal order quantity decisions are affected by demand uncertainty and how a supplier s returns policy can influence these decisions employing the traditional newsboy problem modeling framework the authors investigate these issues considering a supplier who faces a retailer with two or more store outlets with normally distributed and possibly correlated demands to facilitate their analyses the authors employ a methodology based on special error function representations of the highly nonlinear objective functions of the retailer and supplier utilizing this approach the authors are able to provide explicit insights into how a the buyer s total order quantity decision is affected by the variability in demand b buyback prices in combination with wholesale prices can influence the buyer s order quantity response to demand uncertainty c demand uncertainty moderates the effects of the buyback and wholesale prices d supplier s optimal combination of actions are affected by demand variability e retailer s and supplier s expected profits behave in response to changes in the supplier s actions under different levels of demand variability

why have uk disability benefit rolls grown so much abstract over the last 30 years many countries including the uk have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving sickness and disability benefits hereafter disability benefits this is despite health levels that are generally thought to be slowly improving this paper describes the time path of uk disability benefit rolls and explores the existing uk literature together with literature from the usa in search of potential explanations for it since the early 1990s despite a number of detailed descriptive studies surprisingly little attention has been paid to quantifying the importance of the different factors believed to be driving the uk benefit roll growth this is all the more surprising given the continued growth and the level of policy attention recently and currently devoted to disability benefits in the uk

analysis of the impact of price sensitivity factors on the returns policy in coordinating supply chain this paper analyzes the impact of price sensitivity factors on characteristics of returns policy contracts in a single period product supply chain the contract considers stochastic and price dependent demand we present an analytical model and then use numerical methods with the stackelberg game to identify the contract properties we numerically show that a returns policy indeed improves supply chain performance however the benefits earned from the returns policy under price sensitive and variable demand are different for different supply chain partners first when price sensitivity is high profit of the manufacturer decreases with increase in demand variability second when price sensitivity is sufficiently high and demand variability increases the manufacturer has to surrender part of the profits to the retailer in order to continue sales however even after surrendering part of the profits to the retailer the manufacturer still earns profits that are higher than those available in a wholesale price contract last from the perspective of division of channel profits the retailer is always worse off in case of returns policies than in a wholesale price contract therefore to apply this form of incentive in practice managements should consider the impact of price sensitivity on the returns policy and its performance

returns policies between channel partners for durable products many durable products with relatively short selling seasons have been using returns policies between manufacturers and retailers as the contractual protocol for some time recently these sectors have witnessed the growing popularity of peer to peer web based used goods markets as important transaction channels between buyers and sellers given that these two issues are critically linked from both supply and demand perspectives in this paper we study the role that consumer valuation of used products plays in shaping a manufacturer s incentive to offer a returns policy option to a retailer when used goods might be devalued compared to new ones as a result of physical deterioration or obsolescence we do so through a two period dyadic channel framework where the retailer faces uncertain demand for a durable product from a renewable set of customers who are impatient but forward looking the manufacturer on the other hand needs to decide whether or not to offer a returns contract to the retailer we first characterize the necessary and sufficient condition under which a returns contract is the equilibrium strategy as well as the corresponding channel decisions further analysis of this condition reveals that a higher consumer valuation of used products increases the likelihood of a returns contract being the equilibrium strategy this result seems to be robust except when the potential demands for the two periods are quite deterministic and uncorrelated however it contradicts the burgeoning managerial trend to replace returns contracts with price only ones in sectors where used goods are valued relatively highly by the consumers we also discuss how used goods markets affect the equilibrium channel decisions as well as how demand uncertainty and logistics costs associated with returns influence the equilibrium contracting strategy

inventory turnover and product variety abstract retailers face powerful incentives to limit the inventories they stock and this leads them to focus on inventory turn as a performance measure their desire to pare inventory holding costs yields a misalignment of their incentives with those of a supplier seeking to have a broad line of products held we identify the source of the vertical misalignment and demonstrate its impact on product variety we then consider a series of vertical restraints that can potentially correct the problem the analysis is used to explain the otherwise puzzling behavior of suppliers in several recent and significant antitrust matters

a serial supply chain of newsvendor problem with safety stocks under complete and partial information sharing abstract we consider a supply chain where multiple members are serially connected the decision is to determine the ordering quantity of a member to the next upstream member in the supply chain the basic cost model is similar to the newsvendor problem with additional consideration to safety stock this paper presents optimal approaches for coordination of the supply chain under both complete and partial information sharing in order to maximize the total expected benefit for complete information sharing we develop an optimal coordination algorithm for partial information sharing we propose an optimal coordination algorithm based on the alternating direction method and the diagonal quadratic approximation method a numerical example is discussed to show the optimal convergence of ordering quantities and discuss the properties of the proposed algorithms

revenue sharing and vertical control in the video rental industry revenue sharing contracts in which retailers pay a royalty on sales to their suppliers are now widely used in the video rental industry we show that revenue sharing is valuable in vertically separated industries in which demand is either stochastic unpredictable or variable e g systematically declining downstream inventory is chosen before demand is realized and downstream firms engage in intrabrand competition unlike two part tariffs revenue sharing achieves the first best outcome by softening retail price competition without distorting retailers inventory decisions our theories are also consistent with trends in prices and availability following retailers adoption of revenue sharing contracts

the effect of risk aversion on distribution channel contracts implications for return policies the return policy is often used in retailing supply chains however it is controversial in judging their practical value in the literature various theoretical and modeling explanations of why the return policy is used in practice and is preferred by the retailer and manufacturer have been put forth the literature focusing on the channel agents risk attitudes to explain the adoption seems to have led to the conclusion that the two agents preferences for adopting the full return policy over the no return policy are always in conflict and thus the risk attitudes do not explain the adoption of return policy in practice in this paper we reinvestigate this issue we first identify two distinct phases of risk averseness high or low for each of the two agents we show distinct behaviors of how the wholesale price and order size are set in each phase then we show that the full return policy can be preferred over the no return policy by both the agents if both of them are high risk averse this implies that the agents risk attitudes can explain the adoption of return policy this is a new theoretical result which is contrary to the existing understanding in the literature our result highlights the importance and intricacy of channel policies especially when the risk attitudes of agents are considered

efficient supply contracts for fashion goods with forecast updating and two production modes we examine the problem of developing supply contracts that encourage proper coordination of forecast information and production decisions between a manufacturer and distributor of high fashion seasonal products operating in a two mode production environment the first production mode is relatively cheap but requires a long lead time while the second is expensive but offers quick turnaround we focus on contracts of the form w1 w2 b wherewi is the wholesale price offered for production modei andb is a return price offered for items left over at the end of the season we find that such a contract can coordinate the manufacturer and distributor to act in the best interest of the channel the pricing conditions needed to ensure an efficient solution vary depending on the degree of demand forecast improvement between periods and the manufacturer s access to forecast information we also examine whether these conditions ensure a pareto optimal solution with respect to two traditional production settings

a structural dynamic analysis of job turnover and the costs associated with moving to another job this paper provides an empirical analysis of the labor market behavior of employed individuals using a structural on the job search model the costs associated with moving to another job are allowed to be nonzero and may depend on the wage level it is shown that under certain conditions the optimal strategy has the reservation wage property the model is estimated using data on job durations and subjective responses concerning the search strategy the results reveal some strong sources of inflexibility of the labor market copyright 1992 by royal economic society

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

price protection in the personal computer industry price protection is a commonly used practice between manufacturers and retailers in the personal computer pc industry motivated by drastic declines of product values during the product life cycle it is a form of rebate given by the manufacturer to the retailer for units unsold at the retailer when the price drops during the product life cycle it is a controversial policy in the pc industry because it is not clear how such a policy benefits the supply chain and its participants we show that price protection is an instrument for channel coordination for products with long manufacturing lead times so the retailer has a single buying opportunity a properly chosen price protection credit coordinates the channel for products with shorter manufacturing lead times so the retailer has two buying opportunities price protection alone cannot guarantee channel coordination when wholesale prices are exoge nous however when the price protection credit is set endogenously together with the wholesale prices channel coordination is restored in the two buying opportunity setting with fixed wholesale prices we show that price protection has two primary impacts 1 shifting sales forward in time and 2 increasing total sales finally we present a simple numerical example that suggests given the current economics of the pc industry that price protection under fixed wholesale prices may benefit the total chain and the retailer but hurt the manufacturer

supply chain performance anomalies fairness concerns under private cost information abstract this work investigates how fairness concerns influence supply chain decision making while examining the effect of private production cost information and touching on issues related to bounded rationality we conduct laboratory work utilizing a supply chain dyad with an upstream supplier feeding a downstream retailer under a simple wholesale price contract we perform human computer h c experiments where human subjects play the role of the supplier paired with the computerized retailer as well as human human h h experiments where human subjects play the role of both supplier and retailer these experiments allow us to isolate other effects like bounded rationality from the effects of fairness concerns on supply chain decision making we find that compared to standard analytical model the bounded rationality slightly reduces overall supply chain profit without changing its distribution between the supplier and the retailer while fairness concerns lead to greater supply chain profits and a more balanced supply chain profit distribution we further illustrate that under private cost information the retailer s fairness concern is suppressed by the lack of reciprocity from not being able to observe her rival s profit information but that the supplier s fairness concern from altruism persists based on our experimental results we modify classical supply chain models to include utility functions that incorporate both bounded rationality and fairness concerns the estimated other regarding coefficients are significantly lower under private information than under public information for the h h experiments and we find no evidence of inequity aversion for the h c experiments

returns policy new model introduction and consumer welfare abstract this paper investigates how economic outcomes differ for new model introduction between two extreme contracts outright sales contract and returns policy contract with full credit under the outright sales contract we show that the retailer s incentive to introduce a new model can lead to a reduction of consumer welfare when the retailer is moderately risk averse the primary conclusion from this study is that the returns policy contract resolves this conflict between firms and consumers and that the supply chain introduces the new model only when consumer surplus from the new model is higher than that from the old model

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

optimal returns policy for supply chain with e marketplace abstract we study in this paper a supply chain which is integrated by a returns policy in the past owing to a lack of sales channels the returned products would worth very little now with the advance of the e commerce the returned products can be sold with a higher price on the e marketplace in light of this we first investigate the optimal returns policy under the existence of the e marketplace through a mean variance analysis we further study the risk issue associated with the optimal policy extensive simulations are then carried out and the managerial insights are discussed

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

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

equilibrium returns policies in the presence of supplier competition the pioneering pasternack returns policy model analyzed channel coordination with a single supplier catering to a retailer facing stochastic demand for a perishable product with a fixed price and the model showed that giving partial returns of unsold stock to the retailer is the optimal policy for the entire supply chain the result thus begs the question as to why manufacturers of perishable commodities widely accept full returns of unsold stock as the norm we model the environment as one where two capacity constrained manufacturers compete for shelf space with the same retailer and we show that a complete credit returns policy is in fact the only possible equilibrium of the game our results obviate the need for knowing the exact functional form of the demand distribution in order to compute the returns credit as pasternack s results would require from a retailer s standpoint we establish a simple procurement strategy and show that it is optimal the same game with price only contracting has a pure strategy equilibrium when the supplier capacities are below a threshold value and a mixed strategy equilibrium when the supplier capacities cross this threshold but are still so limited that no single supplier can with certainty supply all the quantity demanded

why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk mcvicar d 2006 why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk regional studies 40 519 533 over the last 30 years many organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving earnings replacement sickness and disability benefits the reasons behind this growth particularly for the usa but also to a lesser extent elsewhere have been extensively researched in the economics literature what have been less well researched are the large spatial differences in the size of disability benefit rolls that have emerged in some countries over this period the uk displays a distinct regional pattern where working age men and women in the north are considerably more likely to be claiming disability benefits than those in the south the usa has its own version of the north south divide with many southern states displaying disproportionately large disabilit

coordinating supply chains with competition capacity allocation in semiconductor manufacturing abstract this paper motivated by the experiences of a major us based semiconductor manufacturer presents an integrated model of incentive problems arising in forecasting and capacity allocation our model involves multiple product managers and multiple manufacturing managers who forecast the means of their respective demand and capacity distributions a central coordinator is responsible for allocating capacities to product lines when these distributions are unknown to the central coordinator and capacity is scarce the managers misrepresent their forecasts a product manager inflates his forecast to gain a greater allocation of the capacity a manufacturing manager deflates his forecast to cover for the uncertainties in production we propose a game theoretic model and design a mechanism a bonus scheme for all managers and an allocation rule to allocate realized capacity to the product managers that elicits truthful reporting by all managers the results herein show that the structure of the truth eliciting bonus schemes is rather simple with easily calculable parameters we also show that large classes of allocation rules including the current allocation practice of the firm are manipulable a bonus is often required for elicitation of truthful information we synthesize the implications of our results for the practitioners

mean variance analysis of a single supplier and retailer supply chain under a returns policy abstract in the literature most of the supply chain coordinating policies target at improving the supply chain s efficiency in terms of expected cost reduction or expected profit improvement however optimizing the expected performance alone cannot guarantee that the realized performance measure will fall within a small neighborhood of its expected value when the corresponding variance is high moreover it ignores the risk aversion of supply chain members which may affect the achievability of channel coordination as a result we carry out in this paper a mean variance mv analysis of supply chains under a returns policy we first propose an mv formulation for a single supplier single retailer supply chain with a newsvendor type of product the objective of each supply chain decision maker is to maximize the expected profit such that the standard deviation of profit is under the decision maker s control we study both the cases with centralized and decentralized supply chains we illustrate how a returns policy can be applied for managing the supply chains to address the issues such as channel coordination and risk control extensive numerical studies are conducted and managerial findings are proposed

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

going onto invalidity benefit a study for women 1977 78 1983 84 the main form of state insurance for long term sickness in britain is invalidity benefit there has been a dramatic growth in the stock of claimants on this benefit since its introduction in 1971 a logit model is fitted to explain at the individual level the probability of entering invalidity benefit among over 50 000 women in 1977 8 and over 65 000 in 1983 4 demographic characteristics played a powerful role in this model pay and benefit rates were also significant married women s entry probabilities were highly sensitive to local labour market conditions and much more so than other population groups

comparative normative optimal behavior in two echelon multiple retailer distribution systems for a single period product abstract several recent papers extended the classical single echelon newsboy model for style goods to two echelons that is one studies the interactive decisions between the manufacturer and the retailer now recognized as two separate entities however these papers assumed that there is only one retailer this paper studies optimal decisions and outcomes pertaining to a system with one manufactory and multiple retail outlets compared are the optima from different market ownership configurations ranging from a fully integrated system a single owner owns the manufactory and all retail outlets to a situation in which all entities are separately owned and the manufacturer charges different retailers different prices differential pricing some of our findings appear counter intuitive e g we show that from the societal point of view enforcing uniform pricing is no more desirable that permitting differential pricing

disability benefits replacement ratios and the labour market a time series approach in this paper a study of factors affecting the number of disability beneficiaries in norway is presented equations determining entry rates into the disability benefit system are estimated using aggregated time series data grouped by sex and age unemployment is found to influence disability entry the results regarding effects of the replacement ratio are ambiguous a model determining the number of beneficiaries including the estimated entry equations is presented the model is used to simulate the effect of counterfactual changes in exogenous variables on the number of disability beneficiaries

working through knowledge pools labour market dynamics the transference of knowledge and ideas and industrial clusters this article explores a prominent cluster in the swedish capital stockholm and its surrounding region the ict information and communications technology cluster in particular the article focuses on the issue of the extent to which labour market and labour mobility are the most likely channels for local and extra local sources of knowledge and ideas thus the article positions itself against a growing literature that focuses on rather diffuse and vague notions that knowledge and innovation reside in the air or in the buzz of urban life instead the underlying hypothesis is that in many sectors and industries such things as a cosmopolitan street life or accidental face to face encounters play relatively little part in the flow of experiences knowledge and innovation rather it is in the workplace that these exchanges and flows are located and it is thus through labour mobility that intracluster exchanges occur the article tests such ideas in relation to the ict cluster and the stockholm region using a uniquely detailed time series data set the data set used is based on official taxation and civil registration records and contains complete details on everything from education to career changes to income levels for every individual resident in sweden the detail of the individual records and the complete nature of the data set mean that it offers a unique possibility to examine on a large scale the micro dynamics of individuals in the labour market and in clusters the data are used to examine whether there have existed over time higher levels of labour market mobility in clusters as opposed to the rest of the urban economy the article empirically verifies the idea that labour market mobility is significantly higher in the cluster than in the rest of the urban economy

on sequential commitment in the price dependent newsvendor model abstract we investigate the effect of sequential commitment in the decentralized newsvendor model with price dependent demand sequential commitment allows the self profit maximizing parties to commit to contract parameters e g wholesale price retail price buyback price and order quantity sequentially and alternately and we investigate its effect on the equilibrium profits of the channel and its members sequential commitment introduces more flexibility to contracting in the supply chain and our analysis can provide some insight to channel members who follow a bargaining process to determine the values of contract parameters we show that the introduction of sequential commitment to the price dependent pd newsvendor model with buybacks can significantly improve the manufacturer s and the channel expected profits but it can also decrease the retailer s expected profit finally we demonstrate that with sequential commitment under some conditions the choice of the first mover is endogenized and we identify the unique sequence of commitments by channel members that would arise in equilibrium

the duration of invalidity benefit claims a proportional hazard model this paper analyses the duration of invalidity benefit claims in great britain among men and women the cox proportional hazard model is used to estimate the effect of personal characteristics and economic factors on the claimants probability of leaving the benefit on the whole similar results were obtained for the male and female models although labour market related factors appear to have a stronger effect on the length of male claims women are also likely to have shorter claims than men age and benefit level in particular emerged as having a significant effect on the duration of claims by both groups with higher values for these variables being associated with longer claims

supplier manufacturer coordination in capacitated two stage supply chains abstract manufacture to order is an increasingly popular strategy in commodity electronics and other similar markets where many different product configurations can be produced from common components to succeed in this environment manufacturers need to keep both cost and order fulfillment time low in this article we compare three different mechanisms that a manufacturer whose revenues depend on order delays may use to affect its component supplier s inventory decisions these mechanisms are specifying components inventory level offering a share of the earned revenues to the supplier called simple revenue sharing and offering a two part revenue sharing scheme we show that whereas the first two approaches do not lead to supply chain coordination the two part scheme does we demonstrate with numerical experiments that up to a point the component supplier benefits from having a high utilization of its production facility whereas the manufacturer benefits from having excess production capacity

retail price markup commitment in decentralized supply chains abstract we investigate the operational decisions and resulting profits for a supply chain facing price dependent demand under a policy where there is an ex ante commitment made on the retail price markup we obtain closed form solutions for this policy under the assumption of a multiplicative demand function and we analytically compare its performance with that of a traditional price only policy we compare these results to results obtained when demand follows a linear additive form these formulations are shown to be qualitatively different as the manufacturer s wholesale pricing decision is independent of the retail price markup commitment in the multiplicative case but not when demand is linear additive we demonstrate that the ex ante commitment can lead to pareto improving solutions under linear additive demand but not under the multiplicative demand function we also consider the effect of pricing power in the supply chain by varying who determines the retail price markup

which types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education abstractwhich types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education regional studies this paper provides a conceptual discussion of relatedness which suggests a focus on individuals as a complement to firms and industries the empirical relevance of the main arguments is tested by estimating the effects of related and unrelated variety in education and occupation among employees as well as in industries on regional growth the results show that occupational and educational related variety are positively correlated with productivity growth which supports the conceptual discussion put forth in the paper in addition related variety in industries is found to be negative for productivity growth but positive for employment growth

product warranties and double moral hazard this article explores a model of warranties in which moral hazard problems play a key role the goal is to understand the important characteristics of warranties including their provision of incomplete insurance and the relationship between product quality and coverage we analyze a model in which buyers and sellers take actions that affect a product s performance since these actions are not cooperatively determined an incentives problem arises we characterize the optimal warranty contract and undertake comparative statics to determine the predicted correlation of warranty coverage and product quality

the implications of pooled returns policies abstract when selling products with highly uncertain demands and short life cycles it is common for a manufacturer to offer some form of returns policy to entice the distributors to increase their order quantities in this paper we consider a multi item returns policy called pooled or joint returns policy under which the distributor can return any combination of the products up to r percent of the total purchases across all products we analyze the distributor s optimal profit and order quantity under the pooled returns policy and compare these operating characteristics to the case when a single item non pooled returns policy is instituted under the non pooled returns policy the distributor can only return on individual items using item specific return limits we show an intuitive result that the distributor will always achieve a higher profit under the pooled policy however the manufacturer could actually obtain a lower profit under the pooled policy due to a counter intuitive result the distributor may order less under the pooled policy even though the pooled policy offers more flexibility this counter intuitive result motivates us to determine the conditions under which the distributor would order less under the pooled policy finally we develop a heuristic for determining the distributor s optimal order quantities associated with the n product case under the pooled policy

an economic theory of vertical restraints vertical restraints imposed by manufacturers on the prices locations and sales of retail firms represent a puzzling departure from the simple price mediated exchange of conventional markets in this article we analyze the theoretical basis for these restraints in a setting where retailers inform consumers and are imperfectly competitive and where a manufacturer has some monopoly power we identify three potential externalities affecting retailers decisions these externalities lead to the failure of simple uniform price contracts to coordinate the incentives of retailers with the objective of maximizing combined manufacturer and retailer profits we identify the packages of vertical restraints that are minimally sufficient under various conditions to neutralize the externalities and to achieve the joint profit maximum

contracting over multiple parameters capacity allocation in semiconductor manufacturing abstract this paper is a generalization of mallik and harker mallik s harker p t 2004 coordinating supply chains with competition capacity allocation in semiconductor manufacturing european journal of operational research 159 330 347 that presented an integrated model of incentive problems arising in forecasting and capacity allocation in that model multiple product managers and multiple manufacturing managers forecast the means of their respective demand and capacity distributions and a central coordinator allocates capacities based on these forecasts a mechanism that elicits truthful information from the managers was the main contribution of that paper the objective of this paper is to generalize our previous results to multiple statistics reporting this work assumes that the central coordinator can ask the managers to report multiple statistics mean and variance for example about their respective distributions we propose a game theoretic model and design a mechanism a bonus scheme and an allocation rule that elicits truthful reporting of all statistics by all managers it turns out that the structure of the optimal bonus schemes are rather simple with easily calculable parameters we also show that a large class of allocation rules are manipulable a bonus is often required for elicitation of truthful information we compare our results of multiple statistics reporting with those from mallik and harker 2004 we also characterize under what conditions the reporting of the extra information is of limited use

buyback contracts with price dependent demands effects of demand uncertainty chapter 2 examines buyback contracts in a supplier retailer supply chain where the retailer faces a price dependent downward sloping demand curve subject to uncertainty compared with classical research a fundamental difference of this research lies in its analytical examination of the effects of demand uncertainty on the applicability of buyback contracts to this end the research seeks to characterize the buyback contract model in terms of only demand uncertainty level with such a new research perspective some new and interesting findings are obtained for such issues as how demand uncertainty level affects the applicability of buyback practice and how to apply this practice to improve supply chain members own interests or the supply chain system s efficiency the research in this chapter demonstrates that the uncertainty level inherent in market demand can be a critical factor influencing the applicability of supply chain contracts as well as the contract s administrative cost cachon 2003 and the uncertainty type marvel and peck 1995

the impacts of the full returns policy on a supply chain with information asymmetry abstract in contrast to the existing return policies literature assuming that information is symmetrical between the manufacturer and the retailer we study the full returns policy s impact on supply chains with information asymmetry we first study the case that the base level of the demand follows a discrete distribution with two states we find that the retailer benefits from the full returns policy in all circumstances while the manufacturer and the supply chain are better off under some conditions we then consider the situation in which the base level of the demand is a type of ar 1 process

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

analysis of supply chains with quantity based fixed incentives abstract this paper examines the use of quantity based fixed incentives to coordinate inventory decisions in a decentralized supply chain we consider a two stage supply chain of autonomous supplier and distributor and prove that the optimal ordering policy for the newsvendor distributor under fixed incentives is an s s type policy we further show that external and internal quantity based incentives can restore channel coordination in single period and channel members can benefit through arbitrary splitting of the resulting additional chain profit the single period results are extended to multiple periods and the impact of fixed incentives on the distributor s optimal stocking policy and channel efficiency are examined under three different multi period supplier strategies numerical examples are used to compare the multi period strategies and to provide additional managerial insights the results show that contrary to common belief incentive plans developed and maintained based only on current inventory data perform poorly in long term and that such incentive plans must be periodically updated to enhance their efficiency furthermore we show that high level of incentives designed to push too much inventory downstream of the supply chain can actually reduce the chain s efficiency

returning to work regional determinants of re employment after major redundancies abstractusing matched employer employee data on roughly 429 000 workers made redundant from large plant closures or major downsizing in sweden between 1990 and 2005 this paper analyses the role of the regional industry mix specialization related and unrelated variety in the likelihood of returning to work the results show that a high presence of same or related industries speeds up the re employment process while high concentrations of unrelated activities do not the role of related activities is particularly evident in the short run and in regions with high unemployment consequently the prospect of successful diversification is enhanced in regions with related industries

the quantity flexibility contract and supplier customer incentives consider a supply chain consisting of two independent agents a supplier e g a manufacturer and its customer e g a retailer the latter in turn serving an uncertain market demand to reconcile manufacturing procurement time lags with a need for timely response to the market such supply chains often must commit resources to production quantities based on forecasted rather than realized demand the customer typically provides a planning forecast of its intended purchase which does not entail commitment benefiting from overproduction while not bearing the immediate costs the customer has incentive to initially overforecast before eventually purchasing a lesser quantity the supplier must in turn anticipate such behavior in its production quantity decision this individually rational behavior results in an inefficient supply chain this paper models the incentives of the two parties identifying causes of inefficiency and suggesting remedies particular attention is given to the quantity flexibility qf contract which couples the customer s commitment to purchase no less than a certain percentage below the forecast with the supplier s guarantee to deliver up to a certain percentage above under certain conditions this method can allocate the costs of market demand uncertainty so as to lead the individually motivated supplier and customer to the systemwide optimal outcome we characterize the implications of qf contracts for the behavior and performance of both parties and the supply chain as a whole

the labour market impact of immigration in the first part of this paper we present a stylized model of the labour market impact of immigra tion we then discuss mechanisms through which an economy can adjust to immigration changes in factor prices output mix and production technology in the second part we explain the problems of empirically estimating how immigration affects labour market outcomes of the resident population and review some strategies to address these we then summarize some recent empirical studies for the uk and other countries we conclude with an outlook on what we believe are important avenues for future research

spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain bishop p and gripaios p spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain regional studies this paper examines the impact of externalities on employment growth in sub regions of great britain by estimating ordinary least squares ols and maximum likelihood spatial models at the two digit level for 23 sectors issues arising from relatedness sector differences competition cross boundary spillovers and spatial autocorrelation are explicitly addressed results indicate that specialization has a generally negative impact on growth whilst the impact of diversity is heterogeneous across sectors and strong local competition has a typically positive impact the results question the merits of policies primarily aimed at promoting regional specialization and suggest that diversity local competition and sector heterogeneity are important policy issues bishop p et gripaios p les effets externes geographiques la connectivite et la croissance de l emploi sectoriel en grand