/pdf/convex-analysisnoer-san-nojin-zhan-nituite-5dl2rbmoyr.pdf

Convex Analysisの二,三の進展について

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Decomposition analysis for policymaking in energy:: which is the preferred method?

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

The LMDI approach to decomposition analysis: a practical guide

Problem definition : This paper studies the information-sharing strategy for a retail platform on which multiple competing sellers distribute their products. Academic/practical relevance : Because ...

Information Sharing on Retail Platforms

This paper studies an outsourcing problem where two service providers (suppliers) compete for the service contract from a client. The suppliers face uncertain cost for providing the service because they do not have perfect information about the client's type. The suppliers receive differential private signals about the client type and thus compete under asymmetric information. We first characterize the equilibrium of the supplier competition. Then we investigate two of the client's information sharing decisions. The first decision is about whether the client should help the less-informed supplier get better information. It is shown that less information asymmetry may dampen the supplier competition. Therefore, the client does not necessarily have the incentive to reduce information asymmetry between the suppliers. We characterize the conditions under which leveling the informational ground is beneficial to the client. The second decision is about how much information the client should share with both suppliers so as to improve the quality of their signals. Under the presence of information asymmetry (e.g., when the suppliers have different learning abilities), sharing more information may enhance the advantage of one supplier over the other. As a result, the client's profit may decrease in the amount of information shared with the suppliers. The findings from this paper provide useful managerial implications on information management for outsourcing firms.

/pdf/outsourcing-competition-and-information-sharing-with-21zk1jgosj.pdf

Outsourcing Competition and Information Sharing with Asymmetrically Informed Suppliers

This paper studies the impact of modular assembly on supply chain efficiency. In the modular assembly approach, a manufacturer acquires pre-assembled modules from its suppliers, rather than the individual components, as in the traditional assembly approach. We analyze the competitive behavior of a two-stage modular assembly system consisting of a manufacturer, and a supplier who pre-assembles two components into a module. The firms can choose their own inventory policies and we show the existence of Nash equilibrium in the inventory game. Moving from the traditional to the modular approach has a two-fold effect on the supply chain. First, we investigate the effect of centralizing the component suppliers. It can be shown that when there is no production time shift, the module supplier always holds more component inventories than suppliers do in the traditional approach, which yields a lower cost for the manufacturer. However, the suppliers, and therefore the supply chain may incur a higher cost in the modular approach. Second, we study the effect of a shift in production time from the manufacturing stage to the supplier stage. From numerical studies, it has been found that such a lead time shift always benefits a centralized supply chain, but not necessarily so for a decentralized system. Combining the two effects, we find that the modular approach generally reduces the cost to the manufacturer and the supply chain, which explains the prevalence of modular assembly from the perspective of inventory management. These results also provide some insight into how firms can improve supply chain efficiency by choosing the right decision structure and lead time configuration.

/pdf/the-impact-of-modular-assembly-on-supply-chain-efficiency-19ssv0qcua.pdf

The Impact of Modular Assembly on Supply Chain Efficiency

Driven by increasing costs in the traditionally regarded low‐cost manufacturing bases (e.g., China), many firms have started to outsource their production to the regions of even lower costs (e.g., Southeast Asia). However, a new environment may involve higher cost uncertainty and severer information asymmetry. Motivated by these observations, we consider a sourcing game where competing firms choose between a supplier with transparent certain cost (type‐C supplier) and a supplier with potentially lower but less transparent, uncertain cost (type‐U supplier). We characterize the equilibrium of the sourcing game and study how different parameters affect the firms’ sourcing strategy and profit performance. First, we find that due to information asymmetry, a large market size can make firms prefer the C‐supplier to the U‐supplier even if the latter has a lower average cost. Second, reducing the cost uncertainty or improving the signal accuracy of the U‐supplier does not necessarily make it more attractive to sourcing firms, which cautions the suppliers when making efforts to mitigate cost uncertainty or improve cost estimation. Third, higher competition intensity makes the diversified sourcing strategy more likely to be adopted under certain conditions. Interestingly, increasing the cost of the C‐supplier (e.g., a cost hike in China) may make both sourcing firms better off because it can lead to a new sourcing equilibrium. Finally, this study shows that the direction of quantity distortion under the optimal competitive mechanism differs from that under the traditional monopolistic setting.

/pdf/sourcing-competition-under-cost-uncertainty-and-information-4u2gznvid9.pdf

Sourcing Competition under Cost Uncertainty and Information Asymmetry

This paper studies an outsourcing problem where two service providers (suppliers) compete for the service contract from a client. The suppliers face uncertain cost for providing the service because they do not have perfect information about the client's type. The suppliers receive differential private signals about the client type and thus compete under asymmetric information. We first characterize the equilibrium of the supplier competition. Then we investigate two of the client's information sharing decisions. It is shown that less information asymmetry between the suppliers may dampen their competition. Therefore, the client does not necessarily have the incentive to reduce information asymmetry between the suppliers. We characterize the conditions under which leveling the informational ground is beneficial to the client. We also find that under the presence of information asymmetry (e.g., when the suppliers have different learning abilities), sharing more information with both suppliers may enhance the advantage of one supplier over the other and at the same time increase the upper bound of the suppliers' quotes in equilibrium. Consequently, the suppliers compete less aggressively and the client's payoff decreases in the amount of shared information. The findings from this study provide useful managerial implications on information management for outsourcing firms.

/pdf/outsourcing-competition-and-information-sharing-with-3s0427jyun.pdf

Fuqiang Zhang

Papers

Information Sharing on Retail Platforms

Outsourcing Competition and Information Sharing with Asymmetrically Informed Suppliers

The Impact of Modular Assembly on Supply Chain Efficiency

Sourcing Competition under Cost Uncertainty and Information Asymmetry

Outsourcing Competition and Information Sharing with Asymmetrically Informed Suppliers