Volume 4, Issue 1

For an integrated supply chain with an online direct channel and a traditional retail channel competing with each other, solutions are be identified as to the two channels’ ordering policies, product pricing strategies, and optimal product output, when product costs in the two channels are disrupted in different ways. Findings are as follows: 1) For the integrated supply chain, when unanticipated events lead to product cost increase, market size will shrink, and the system profit is harmed. In contrast, when unanticipated events lead to reduced product cost, market size will expand, and system profit increases; 2) Production strategies applicable to normal situations have certain robustness, and should be maintained when product cost disruption caused by unanticipated events is relatively small; 3) When product cost disruption caused by unanticipated events is relatively large, product sales price should be first adjusted, and aligned with the way that product cost is disrupted. Meanwhile, order quantity and product output should also be properly adjusted. That is, order quantity and output need to be reduced when product cost increases; order quantity and output need to be increased when product cost is reduced. In the end, this paper employs numerical examples to testify the findings. Research conclusions help to further enrich and extend the theoretic basis of “supply chain disruption management”, and are helpful for researchers’ further study.

Considering time inconsistency and inter-temporal preference of the decision maker who is facing inter-temporal choices, this paper employs hyperbolic discounting to reflect these characteristics in governing inventory replenishment policy under inflation. The authors take the subjective perception of the decision maker and the objective indicator from the capital market into consideration. The decision maker’s subjective perception includes confidence towards future value of money and anxiety to return the money, while the objective indicator is represented by the compounded discount rate. The results suggest that over the given planning horizon, with more confidence, inventory policy of larger order quantity and smaller order frequency should be adopted; with more anxiety within a threshold, inventory policy of smaller order quantity and larger order frequency should be adopted, and with more anxiety beyond this threshold, inventory policy keeps unchanged; with a larger discount rate, inventory policy of smaller order quantity and larger order frequency should be adopted.

To strengthen operational process analysis and normalize information requirements description in systemic operations based on information systems, a new operational architecture modeling method is proposed from the perspective of information flow analysis. An operational architecture modeling framework based on information flow analysis is established by referring to American department of defense architecture framework (DoDAF V2.0). Concepts of entities, relationships, attributes and mapping rules are defined. Operational activity model, operational nod model and information alternation model are constructed. Finally, aerial assault operation is taken as an example to demonstrate the modeling process. Simulation results show that operational process analysis is more refined and information requirement descriptions are more visible, normal and clear, which validate the feasibility and validity of the method and models.

This paper proposes that repatriate’s knowledge transfer is composed of two dimensions: Explicit knowledge transfer and tacit knowledge transfer. The influencing of repatriate’s knowledge transfer on enterprise performance is discussed, and the mediating role of ambidexterity innovation in the above relationships is analyzed. Then, relative assumptions are put forward, and theoretical model is established. Lastly, 156 multinational corporations are selected as study object, and data are collected, bias analysis, descriptive statistic analysis and hierarchical regression analysis are made. The conclusions are got, which are explicit knowledge transfer and tacit knowledge transfer have significant positive effect on exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation, respectively; and explicit knowledge transfer has more effect on exploitative innovation, while tacit knowledge transfer has more effect on exploratory innovation. The findings also indicate that exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation play partial mediation effect on the relationship between explicit knowledge transfer, tacit knowledge transfer and enterprise performance.

This paper introduces the other-regarding preferences coefficients and studies the impact of social preferences on supply chain performance in the price-setting newsvendor setting. It is assumed that the stochastic demand is multiplicative. The manufacturer and retailer play a Stackelberg game. We analyze the impact of the decision-maker’s social preferences on the manufacturer’s optimal wholesale price, the retailer’s optimal retail price and order quantity, the supply chain member’s profits and utilities, and the supply chain system’s profits and utilities under three different cases that only the retailer, only the manufacturer and both are with social preferences. We show that a manufacturer, as a leader, should find a spiteful retailer, while a retailer, as a follower, should find a manufacturer with generous liability, to improve the entire supply chain. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate these results.

In this paper, smoothing approximation to the square-root exact penalty functions is devised for inequality constrained optimization. It is shown that an approximately optimal solution of the smoothed penalty problem is an approximately optimal solution of the original problem. An algorithm based on the new smoothed penalty functions is proposed and shown to be convergent under mild conditions. Three numerical examples show that the algorithm is efficient.