Search results for "Operations"

Distributed Consensus in Noncooperative Inventory Games

2009

This paper deals with repeated nonsymmetric congestion games in which the players cannot observe their payoffs at each stage. Examples of applications come from sharing facilities by multiple users. We show that these games present a unique Pareto optimal Nash equilibrium that dominates all other Nash equilibria and consequently it is also the social optimum among all equilibria, as it minimizes the sum of all the players’ costs. We assume that the players adopt a best response strategy. At each stage, they construct their belief concerning others probable behavior, and then, simultaneously make a decision by optimizing their payoff based on their beliefs. Within this context, we provide a …

Secret versus public reserve price in an “outcry” English procurement auction: Experimental results

2015

Abstract In a set of human experiments, we analyze the impact of the buyer׳s reserve price policy in an online open outcry reverse auction. We measure the impact of revealing or not the reserve price on the buyer׳s expected cost when suppliers may be risk-averse. Results confirm that the optimal public reserve price policy dominates for the buyer when the lowest cost supplier is weakly risk-averse but in contrast with theory, the secret reserve price policy does not dominate when he becomes very risk-averse. Analysis of strategic suppliers׳ bidding behavior shows, in conformity with theory, that they react to the secret reserve price and are more aggressive when they are more risk-averse. T…

Multiobjective GRASP with Path Relinking

2015

In this paper we review and propose different adaptations of the GRASP metaheuristic to solve multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, we describe several alternatives to specialize the construction and improvement components of GRASP when two or more objectives are considered. GRASP has been successfully coupled with Path Relinking for single-objective optimization. Moreover, we propose different hybridizations of GRASP and Path Relinking for multiobjective optimization. We apply the proposed GRASP with Path Relinking variants to two combinatorial optimization problems, the biobjective orienteering problem and the biobjective path dissimilarity problem. We report …

Pricing of digital services as an effectual co-creative process

2022

Entrepreneurs have to price their innovations under the unpredictability of customers’ reactions. While predictive pricing methods are prevalent in business-to-business pricing literature, we argue for the critical importance of control-oriented pricing strategies for digital services. By applying effectuation theory, our study investigates how entrepreneurs co-create their pricing strategies for their digital services as a co-evolutionary, iterative process with their customers. We found that pricing is the co-evolutionary process where entrepreneurs learn from their interactions with customers and use this knowledge to develop and improve their pricing practices further. The findings cont…

Stability analysis of logistics networks with time-delays

2012

Logistics network represents a complex system where different elements that are logistic locations interact with each other. This interaction contains delays caused by time needed for delivery of the material. In this paper, we study local input-to-state stability of such logistics networks. Their behaviour is described by a functional differential equation with a constant time-delay. An appropriate Lyapunov–Razumikhin function and the small gain condition are utilized to establish some conditions for stability analysis of the network under consideration. Our stability conditions for the logistics network are based on the information about the interconnection properties between logistic loc…

Comparison of MeSH terms and KeyWords Plus terms for more accurate classification in medical research fields. A case study in cannabis research

2021

Abstract KeyWords Plus and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are widely used in bibliometric studies for topic mapping. The objective of this study is to compare the two description systems in documents about cannabis research to find the concordance between systems and establish whether there is neutrality in topic mapping. A total of 25,593 articles from 1970 to 2019 were drawn from Web of Science's Core Collection and Medline and analyzed. The tidytext library, Zipf's law, topic modeling tools, the contingency coefficient, Cramer's V, and Cohen's kappa were used. The results included 10,107 MeSH terms and 28,870 KeyWords Plus terms. The Zipf distribution of the terms was different for each…

Application of Lean Six Sigma methodology to a school based immunization project in Italy

2015

Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making: An entropy-based approach to assess tourism sustainability

2019

In this article, we propose a method for ranking tourist destinations and evaluating their performances under a sustainability perspective: a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making method is applied for determining sustainability performance values and ranking destinations accordingly. We select a set of sustainability evaluation criteria and use a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to weight the selected criteria. We also optimize each evaluator’s membership function support by means of a fuzzy entropy maximization criteria. A case study is illustrated and results are compared with two data envelopment analysis–based models. The simplicity of the proposed approach along with the easy reada…

French firms’ strategies for protecting their intellectual property

2012

In attempting to protect their innovations, firms can choose from a range of mechanisms, which may be either non-statutory (trade secrets, design complexity, and lead-time advantage over competitors) or statutory (patent, design registration, trademark, copyright). Yet, little is known about how firms do actually make their choices from among these different appropriability mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to determine how French firms’ use of intellectual property protection mechanisms relates to the type of innovation, the characteristics of the market sector in which they operate, the firms’ characteristics, and their human resources strategies. Our empirical model draws on four Fren…

Multilayer neural networks: an experimental evaluation of on-line training methods

2004

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are inspired by the structure of biological neural networks and their ability to integrate knowledge and learning. In ANN training, the objective is to minimize the error over the training set. The most popular method for training these networks is back propagation, a gradient descent technique. Other non-linear optimization methods such as conjugate directions set or conjugate gradient have also been used for this purpose. Recently, metaheuristics such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms or tabu search have been also adapted to this context.There are situations in which the necessary training data are being generated in real time and, an extensive tr…