Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the supply chain coordination with contracts. Numerous supply chain models are discussed. In each model, the supply chain optimal actions are identified. The chapter extends the newsvendor model by allowing the retailer to choose the retail price in addition to the stocking quantity. Coordination is more complex in this setting because the incentives provided to align one action might cause distortions with the other action. The newsvendor model is also extended by allowing the retailer to exert costly effort to increase demand. Coordination is challenging because the retailer's effort is noncontractible—that is, the firms cannot write contracts based on the effort chosen. The chapter also discusses an infinite horizon stochastic demand model in which the retailer receives replenishments from a supplier after a constant lead time. Coordination requires that the retailer chooses a large basestock level.

Supply Chain Coordination with Contracts

Complementarities and fit strategy, structure, and organizational change in manufacturing

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-path-to-the-modern-economy-4dlla029fs.pdf

Institutions and the path to the modern economy

A major challenge in the operation of wireless communications systems is the efficient use of radio resources. One important component of radio resource management is power control, which has been studied extensively in the context of voice communications. With the increasing demand for wireless data services, it is necessary to establish power control algorithms for information sources other than voice. We present a power control solution for wireless data in the analytical setting of a game theoretic framework. In this context, the quality of service (QoS) a wireless terminal receives is referred to as the utility and distributed power control is a noncooperative power control game where users maximize their utility. The outcome of the game results in a Nash (1951) equilibrium that is inefficient. We introduce pricing of transmit powers in order to obtain Pareto improvement of the noncooperative power control game, i.e., to obtain improvements in user utilities relative to the case with no pricing. Specifically, we consider a pricing function that is a linear function of the transmit power. The simplicity of the pricing function allows a distributed implementation where the price can be broadcast by the base station to all the terminals. We see that pricing is especially helpful in a heavily loaded system.

/pdf/efficient-power-control-via-pricing-in-wireless-data-34gk0jwxel.pdf

Efficient power control via pricing in wireless data networks

Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis

PrefaceCh. 1Introduction3Ch. 2Lattices, Supermodular Functions, and Related Topics7Ch. 3Optimal Decision Models94Ch. 4Noncooperative Games175Ch. 5Cooperative Games207Bibliography263Index269

Supermodularity and Complementarity

Comparative Statics of the Firm

Activity optimization games with complementarity

Acyclic k -connected subgraphs for distributed alternate routing in communications networks

This paper establishes bounds on the length of certain strictly monotone paths, relative to a given linear objective function, on a polymatroid or on the base of a polymatroid. Specialized bounds are given for a strict polymatroid and for a matroid polyhedron. Bounds on the diameter are included.

Donald M. Topkis

Papers

Supermodularity and Complementarity

Comparative Statics of the Firm

Activity optimization games with complementarity

Acyclic k -connected subgraphs for distributed alternate routing in communications networks

Paths on polymatroids