Equity, Efficiency and Evolutionary Stability in Bargaining Games with Joint Production


Book Description

Result 1.10 Simple equity standards were superior to more complex ones, even though the latter might be economically more relevant. Result 1.11 Equity based on quantity (input) and return (output) was most successful and received a hit rate of almost i within a range of 10%, i.e., within a distance of ±5% of the predicted share. Result 1.12 A substantial share of observations is consistent with egalitarian considerations. 1.7 Summary The study investigates the predictive power of equity theory and strategic concepts within ultimatum bargaining with advance produc tion. This is different from many other experimental studies on non cooperative bargaining games, since usually the ressource to be dis tributed between the subjects is given by the experimenter. Here, the "pie" is produced via joint production effort. This scenario is more general than bargaining without production, and we think it is more natural as well. The description of the raw data showed that the production choices are considerably dispersed, but nevertheless systematically biased to ward the respective player's efficient production level. The distribu tions of demanded return shares and demanded surplus shares partly replicated findings of other studies; namely, a low percentage of high demands and a considerable proportion of equal surplus splits. But, they also indicate that "advance production" compared to "no pro duction" should be considered an important treatment in studies on ultimatum bargaining.




Planning Stability in Material Requirements Planning Systems


Book Description

In logistics systems, the issue of planning stability has attracted increased attention and interest in recent years. This is mainly due to an increasing integration of planning systems both within and across companies in supply chain management. The propagation of adjustments in planning systems first acquired wide attention when MRP systems were employed as standard planning tools for material coordination. Within a rolling horizon framework the MRP application produced considerable planning instability which origins from uncertainties in the planner's exogenous environment as well as from endogenous sources. This book presents an analytical investigation that gives deep insight into the influence of different kind of inventory control rules on the stability of material planning systems under stochastic demand in a rolling horizon environment.




The Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution


Book Description

Individuals, groups, and societies all experience conflict, and attempt to resolve it in numerous ways. This Handbook brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to offer perspectives on the current state and future challenges in negotiation and conflict resolution. It will serve as an aid to scholars in identifying new research topics, provide a guide to current debates, and identify complementarities between approaches taken by different disciplines and the insights which those approaches generate. Leading researchers of economics, psychology, organizational behavior, policy, and other fields have contributed chapters. The volume is organized to purposefully juxtapose contributions from different fields to enable cross-fertilization between the disciplines and to generate new and creative approaches to studying the topic. These chapters provide a lens into current scholarship, and a window into the future of the field of economic conflict resolution. The confluence of research perspectives represented will identify further synergies and advances in our understanding of this topic.




Efficiency versus Sustainability in Dynamic Decision Making


Book Description

To all who taught me, and to all who will. Over the past fifteen years the notions of efficiency and sustainability have, more than any others, influenced the academic and public discussion concerning the intertemporal allocation of resources, especially as regards the economics of growth and environment. This treatise formally develops and counterposes these notions by means of the construct of a trajectorial objective, which is here developed, along with its implications, as a natural advance upon the classical scalar objective. In the course of this study it becomes clear that efficiency and sustainability are by no means identical, given that efficiency, on the one hand, is the concept for avoiding wasteful behavior, and sustainability, on the other, is the concept for ensuring that certain critical aspiration levels, which usually reflect the wish for survival, are maintained. Nonetheless, contrary to what may be assumed, these two concepts do not generally yield mutually exclusive solutions; in fact, they can be combined to complement each other in the quest for unimprovable long-term solutions which sustain given and necessary aspiration levels. This treatise develops and analyzes dynamic decision models (DDM) with one trajectorial objective according to the methodology of multi criteria decision making (MCDM). Moreover, introducing the method of distance maximization crucially augments MCDM and proves to be invaluable for DDMs in the case of a nonexistent utopia trajectory as well as in the case of sustainability as objective.




Performance Analysis and Optimization of Inbound Call Centers


Book Description

The material presented in this book is a result of my work in the field of call center management during the period 1999-2002. The focus is on the perfor mance analysis and optimization of inbound call centers. Since call arrivals and call-handling times are often random in inbound call centers, this thesis concentrates on the performance analysis and optimization using queueing models. This book describes mathematical methods and algorithms to relate the number of agents and telephone trunks of a given call center configuration to technical as well as economic performance measures. This book has been accepted as a PhD thesis in Business Administration at the Technical University of Clausthal, Germany. I am indebted to many people for their support during the process of writing this thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Dr. Stefan Helber, for motivating my research to call center related problems. He gently pushed me in fruitful directions and encouraged me to strike a balance between mathematical results and economic implications. Many other helpful suggestions came from him, and his constructive comments on draft versions of this book are invaluable. I am thankful to him and to Prof. Dr. Rolf Schwinn for refereeing this thesis.




Heterogenous Agents, Interactions and Economic Performance


Book Description

In traditional economics models of perfect competition agent's interactions are all mediated through the market. Interactions are anonymous, global and indirect. This is a powerful model, but we see many instances in which one, and sometimes all, of the previous characteristics fail to hold true. The type of agent you are, or your identity, can affect the type of interaction we have, and most surely the relationship between micro-behaviour and macro-phenomena in non-trivial ways. This book contains a selection of papers presented at the 6th Workshop on Economics with Heterogenous Interacting Agents (WEHIA). The contributions show that work done in other fields like evolutionary biology, statistical mechanics, social network theory and others help us to understand the way in which economic systems operate. Virtually all of the papers presented in this volume draw on some aspect or other of these varied approaches to related problems.




Capacity Reservation for Capital-intensive Technologies


Book Description

Arguably the central problem in operations research and management science (OR/MS) addressed by e-Business is better coordination of supply and de mand, including price discovery and reduction of transactions costs of buyer seller interactions. In capital-intensive industries like chemicals and steel, the out-of-pocket costs of excess capacity and the opportunity costs of underuti lized capacity have been important factors driving the growth of exchanges for improving demand and supply coordination through e-Business platforms. Stefan Spinler addresses in his dissertation one of the most interesting aspects of this evolution for OR/MS, the parallel development of long-term and short-term markets for capacity and output, accompanied by a range of exotic options and forwards as the basic mechanisms supporting transac tions. This is a fascinating research topic because it builds on the powerful framework of real options, while connecting directly to key operations deci sions (capacity planning, staffing, maintenance, and so forth) of the plants and technologies whose output is the focus of contracts. From the perspec tive of practice, the use of these contracting mechanisms, as facilitated by a new breed of B2B exchanges, represents an opportunity for further improving supply chain performance and capital asset productivity.




Analysis, Controllability and Optimization of Time-Discrete Systems and Dynamical Games


Book Description

Focuses on the analysis, optimization and controllability of time-discrete dynamical systems and games under the aspect of stability, controllability and (for games) cooperative and non-cooperative treatment. The investigation of stability is based on Lyapunov's method which is generalized to non-autonomous systems. Optimization and controllability of dynamical systems is treated, among others, with the aid of mapping theorems such as implicit function theorem and inverse mapping theorem. Dynamical games are treated as cooperative and non-cooperative games and are used in order to deal with the problem of carbon dioxide reduction under economic aspects. The theoretical results are demonstrated by various applications.




Kanban-Controlled Manufacturing Systems


Book Description

5th Werner Kern Award for Productivity Research 2005 Kanban control systems bear a great potential to significantly improve operations. A company may reap the full benefits of kanban control only after determining an optimal or near-optimal system configuration. To do that, methods are needed to evaluate the performance and operating costs of individual system configurations. We propose an innovative construction-kit approach that enables us to build stochastic analytical models of a large class of single- and multi-product kanban systems. The presented construction-kit approach may be extended and augmented in various directions.




Unemployment, Market Structure and Growth


Book Description

In his Ph. D. thesis, Rudiger Wapler analyses the causes of the persistently high unemployment rates especially in continental Europe. Particular emphasis is placed on imperfect labour and product markets on the one hand, and on the numerous links between unemployment, innovations and growth on the other. Hence, Rudiger Wapler provides an important contribution towards a better understanding of both the development of labour markets as well as the dynamics of growth. To aid readers with only little prior knowledge of labour markets, the book presents the most common theories of unemployment: (1) trade-union models in which union bargaining power leads to wages above their market-clearing level, (2) efficiency-wage models in which employers voluntarily pay higher wages in order to motivate or discipline their workers or to reduce the job turnover rate, as well as (3) matching models in which unemployment is caused by the continuous turnover of jobs and workers. In addition, emphasis is placed on the fact that labour needs to be treated as heterogeneous, a fact often neg lected in the literature. Subsequently, these labour-market foundations are integrated with modern theories of innovations and growth, making the ap proach much more relevant and plausible. Without doubt, the generalisations of the models performed by Rudiger Wapler show that there are limits to such formal analysis. Due to the increasing number of interdependencies, it is doubtful whether even more complex models provide additional (usable) insights.