Search results for "Operations"
showing 10 items of 1692 documents
Firm innovativeness and work-life balance
2017
ABSTRACTAssessing firms’ innovativeness is not an easy task. The literature recognises a number of innovativeness indicators. Most of them are technology-based indicators which perform well in high-tech industries but might be ineffective in other industries where patenting is not usual or in which R&D budgets are low or not formalised. In this paper, we critically review previous innovativeness indicators and we propose a new approach to assess firm innovativeness that is based not on the role of technology but on that of people. This new approach focuses on the existence of work-life balance benefits that are connected with motivation, engagement and creativity in the workplace. We argue …
Overcoming the “lost before translation” problem: An exploratory study
2019
This paper draws on Stokes’ (1997) framework to position the disconnection between theory and practice as a knowledge production problem. In this sense, we argue that a better understanding of different academic profiles is extremely important to focus efforts on those academics that may overcome the ‘lost before translation’ problem. Our data, that come from a survey of researchers affiliated to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), provide a good opportunity to explore the factors that might increase or impede the likelihood that researchers engage in research that reconciles the quest for fundamental understanding with the consideration of use (Pasteur’s profile), rather than in …
Revisiting the Trade-off Between Risk and Incentives: The Shocking Effect of Random Shocks?
2019
Despite its central role in the theory of incentives, empirical evidence of a trade-off between risk and incentives remains scarce. We reexamine this trade-off in a workplace lab environment and find that, in line with theory, principals increase fixed pay while lowering performance pay when the relationship between effort and output is noisier. Unexpectedly, agents produce substantially more in the noisy environment than in the baseline despite weaker incentives. In addition, principals’ earnings are significantly higher in the noisy environment. We show that these findings can be accounted for when agents maximize a non-CARA utility function or when they exhibit loss aversion. Data and t…
University trustees as channels between academe and industry: Toward an understanding of the executive science network
2013
Abstract Policy makers in the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) see “autonomous” research universities as increasingly central to “world class” status, technology development and economic innovation. Trustees or regents (US) and external board members (EU) are seen as a marker of university autonomy. Examining university trustees may shed some light on the role of trustees/external board members play in research strategy, innovation and economic development. Given that a number of trustees of US research universities sit on the boards of directors of large corporations with research interests, we hypothesized that trustees may be an important channel connecting universities to …
Some consistency issues in multi-criteria decision making
2017
The complexity of decision-making problems included under the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) paradigm has favored the proliferation of many schools of thought and varied methodologies. It has not yet been possible to prove the supremacy of any of these approaches. Moreover, in some cases it is difficult to combine the theoretical validity of the approximations with their practical appropriateness. It seems that rigor and applicability are two opposing concepts, something that should not be so. It is our responsibility to bridge the gap. To reduce the gap between theory and practice and use effective methodological approaches, it is necessary to combine the rigor and objectivity of tr…
A Multi objective inventory model for short food supply chains
2017
Over the past 50 years, vertically integrated multinationals dominated global food markets by providing huge product diversity at low prices. Such systems are characterized by long supply chains capable of achieving high cost efficiencies resulting from the use of cheap raw materials, high chemical inputs, industrial shelf-life extension processes, economies of scale and mechanization. This dominant position on the market, however, has been achieved at a heavy cost on the global environment, generated by massive food wastage, and by a steady supply of fossil fuels. For such reasons, global supply chains are considered unsustainable and new food systems are being promoted in order to replace…
Measuring diversity. A review and an empirical analysis
2021
Abstract Maximum diversity problems arise in many practical settings from facility location to social networks, and constitute an important class of NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. There has been a growing interest in these problems in recent years, and different mathematical programming models have been proposed to capture the notion of diversity. They basically consist of selecting a subset of elements of a given set in such a way that a measure based on their pairwise distances is maximized to achieve dispersion or representativeness. In this paper, we perform an exhaustive comparison of four mathematical models to achieve diversity over the public domain library MDPLIB, …
Two-dimensional filters for structured text
1997
The paper introduces a method for defining filters for structured text. In the method, the text structure is originally defined by a grammar consisting of a set of productions. To describe the information interests, a two-dimensional template is first created interactively from the grammar to show the structure of a set of textual elements, at a chosen level of detail. The template depicts the hierarchical structure of the elements and indicates also optionality, alternatives, and iteration in the structure. Then, the template is filled by constraints and annotations. The constraints allow giving conditions to the content of parts, to the position of parts in an ordered set of parts, and to…
Firefly algorithm based upon slicing structure encoding for unequal facility layout problem
2019
Finding the locations of departments or machines in a workspace is classified as a Facility Layout Problem. Good placement of departments has a relevant influence on manufacturing costs, work in process, lead times and production efficiency. This paper analyses the problem of allocating departments with restrictions in terms of unequal area and rectangular shape within a facility, in order to minimize the sum of material handling costs taking into account the satisfaction of the aspect ratio requested. In particular, we propose for the first time a Firefly Algorithm based on the slicing structure encoding. The proposed method was tested comparing the results obtained from other authors on t…
Biproportional Method for Analysing Interindustry Dynamics: the case of France
1990
Two elements are being presented in this paper: (1) A new and original method for analysing matrix dynamics, called the synthetical biproportional projector method (SBP), which can be used to project input–output tables and compare one with another. (2) Some results for France for the important period 1970–85. The paper starts with the observation that no systematic study of the change in the French productive structure as displayed In the input–output tables (tableaux entries-sorties in France) has ever been made. This is unfortunate, since a complete series of data is now available concerning a key period of the French economic evolution including the petroleum crisis, European integratio…