The Impact of Intranet Technology on Power in Franchisee/Franchisor Relationships

In this exploratory study we investigate the impact of an organization-wide intranet on the power relationships between franchisee and franchisor. This article reports on a study of an intranet implementation at PJ's, a franchise organization consisting of 25 coffee and tea cafes. Through use of interviews as well as a detailed case study of one franchisee, we examine how the relationship between franchisor and franchisee changes with the implementation of an intranet. Among the findings was that the intranet appeared to increase power of both franchisee and franchisor, though the franchisor continued to have relatively more power than the franchisee. The franchisor did not include franchisee to franchisee communications as an intranet feature and, interestingly, the franchisees did not seek to develop such a virtual community outside of the system. We speculate that the current satisfaction with the franchisor among franchisees might explain disinterest in such a community. We also found evidence that some franchisees who entered the franchise organization early in its evolution might react much differently to the implementation of the intranet than those who invested in the more established organization several years later.     

以加盟商的视角谈品牌服装的商品组合

以品牌为主导的国内服装产业,目前正在以品牌特许经营的方式,在中国服装市场上到处建设销售网络。同时,作为拥有一定知名度和市场占有率的品牌服装,订货也由最初的代理制转变为买断制,这就给加盟商带来了一定程度的压力和风险,因此作为加盟商如何组织自己的商品组合就变得十分重要,本文将站在加盟商的角度,对商品组合的构成进行详细的分析,以希望能在提升品牌形象的基础上实现利益的最大化。     

Optimizing the size and locations of facilities in competitive multi-site service systems

We propose a multi-site location-allocation model for selecting locations in competitive service systems. Examples are typical franchise systems or retailers with multiple outlets. The proposed objective function maximizes a measure of spatial utility of users subject to constraints on waiting time of users and budget of the multi-site facility owners. The intent is to provide model support in assisting with decisions by one multi-facility owner about locating new sites or closing current sites in the presence of one or more competitors, each of which control several sites. Algorithms and spatial data necessary for solving the problem are described. The model is described in the context of locating bank branches though it is applicable in many other contexts.     

Autonomy in information: pre-trial publicity,commercial media,and user generated content

When information is no longer scarce, what does this mean for a legal system? Will this effectively eliminate the possibility of an unbiased juror in the United States? This article will look at the history of pre-trial publicity cases and the impending effect of rapidly increasing technological outlets. I argue that greater media availability will not necessarily increase the biases of potential jurors. Instead, adopting the main argument from Yochai Benkler's, The Wealth of Networks, I posit that non-traditional, user-generated content (UGC) can solve a failure in the conventional mass media market. Looking at the sharing of information as an iterated game, I contend that non-commercial UGC creation is free from constraints imposed on for profit media. Paradoxically, it is this unorganized and unprofessional publicity that can remedy defects in the professional media market. Non-commercial media is more autonomous, allowing the coverage of opinions and viewpoints mainstream media outlets commonly fail to address. As these non-commercial firms successfully fill holes in traditional media reporting, new outlets will be encouraged to enter the market.     

Collective intelligence applied to legal e-discovery: A ten-year case study of Australia franchise and trademark litigation

The purpose of this research is to develop a formal knowledge e-discovery methodology, using advanced information technology and decision support analysis, to define legal case evolution based on Collective Litigation Intelligence (CLI). In this research, a decade of Australia’s retail franchise and trademark litigation cases are used as the corpus to analyze and synthesize the evolution of modern retail franchise law in Australia. The formal processes used in the legal e-discovery research include a LexisNexis search strategy to collect legal documents, text mining to find key concepts and their representing key phrases in the documents, clustering algorithms to associate the legal cases into groups, and concept lattice analysis to trace the evolutionary trends of the main groups. The case analysis discovers the fundamental issues for retail modernization, advantages and disadvantages of retail franchising systems, and the potential litigation hazards to be avoided in the Australian market. Given the growing number of legal documents in global court systems, this research provides a systematic and generalized CLI methodology to improve the efficiency and efficacy of research across international legal systems. In the context of the case study, the results demonstrate the critical importance of quickly processing and interpreting existing legal knowledge using the CLI approach. For example, a brand management company, which purchases a successful franchise in one market is under limited time constraints to evaluate the legal environment across global markets of interest. The proposed CLI methodology can be applied to derive market entry strategies to secure growth and brand expansion of a global franchise.     

A cloud‐based responsive replenishment system in a franchise business model using a fuzzy logic approach

In today's volatile markets, increasingly unpredictable customer demand is exerting great challenges to responsive replenishment. The complexity of responsive replenishment is higher when the business is global in which demand in both domestic and overseas markets has to be catered for. The emergence of cloud computing has eased the difficulties as it allows nearly real‐time access to a universal platform for information sharing between franchisors and franchisees, creating huge opportunities for understanding global market needs for responsive replenishment. Considering the existence of uncertainties due to the fluctuating demands, fuzzy logic is useful in providing decision support for replenishment in uncertain environments. This paper presents a cloud‐based responsive replenishment system to manage operation data of a franchise business using cloud computing, and for analysis using fuzzy logic in order to provide franchisors with the required inventory levels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that applies cloud computing and artificial intelligence techniques in franchising. A pilot run of the system is conducted in an education company, which is considered to be a good representation of an industry operating with a franchise model. The results show that the system allows franchisors to formulate effective responsive replenishment strategies.     

Evolution of unplanned coordination in a market selection game

This paper examines the evolution of unplanned coordination among independent agents in a market selection game, which is a noncooperative repeated game with many agents and several markets. Every agent is supposed to simultaneously choose a single market for maximizing its own payoff obtained by selling its product at the selected market. It is assumed that the market price is determined by the total supply of products. For example, if many agents choose a particular market, the market price at that market is low. The point of the market selection is to choose a market that is not chosen by many other agents. In this paper, game strategies are genetically updated by localized selection and mutation. A new strategy of an agent is probabilistically selected from its neighbors' strategies by the selection operation or randomly updated by the mutation operation. It is shown that the maximization of each agent's payoff leads to the unplanned coordination of the market selection where the undesired concentration of agents is avoided. The unplanned coordination is compared with the planned global coordination obtained by the maximization of the total payoff over all agents     

A leader-follower game in competitive facility location

We address the problem of locating new facilities of a firm or franchise that enters a market where a competitor operates existing facilities. The goal of the new entrant firm is to decide the location and attractiveness of its new facilities that maximize its profit. The competitor can react by opening new facilities, closing existing ones, and adjusting the attractiveness levels of its existing facilities, with the aim of maximizing its own profit. The demand is assumed to be aggregated at certain points in the plane and the new facilities of both the firm and the competitor can be located at predetermined candidate sites. We employ the gravity-based rule in modeling the behavior of the customers where the probability that a customer visits a certain facility is proportional to the facility attractiveness and inversely proportional to the distance between the facility site and demand point. We formulate a bilevel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model where the firm entering the market is the leader and the competitor is the follower. We propose heuristics that combine tabu search with exact solution methods.     

A plot drainage network as a conceptual tool for the spatial representation of surface flow pathways in agricultural catchments

The drainage network must take the farming systems and the landscape structure into consideration to describe flow pathways in the agricultural catchment. A new approach is proposed to build the drainage network which is based on the identification of the inlets and outlets for surface water flow on each farmers’ field (or plot), estimating the relative areas contributing to the surface yield. The delineation of these areas and their links in terms of surface flow pathways provides us with a pattern of relationships between individual plots, i.e. going from each plot to the other plots over the entire catchment. In this approach, flow directions are firstly calculated in the usual way by taking account of slope direction. Plot outlets are defined from the digital elevation model (DEM) and then linked together using a tree structure. If present, linear networks such as hedges modify both the flow directions and the location of plot outlets, hence modify this tree structure. In a final step, the plots are themselves linked together using a graph structure illustrated by an arrow diagram. This drainage network based on plot outlets is applied to a 15-km² catchment area represented by 38,300 pixels and 2000 plots. This new drainage network takes into consideration 5300 plot outlets, which greatly reduces the number of objects in comparison with a drainage network made up of pixels or DEM cells. This method leads to a simple and functional representation of surface flow pathways in an agricultural catchment. It allows us to identify the key plots controlling stream water pollution where converging flow pathways are coming from numerous or large-sized plots. Finally, it produces a functional representation for decision support.     

竞争市场新进企业的容量设施选址研究

合理的设施选址方案对于企业进入新市场时占领市场份额具有重要的战略意义.竞争设施选址是考虑竞争者运行现有设施时如何在市场中启动新设施的问题.在实现特定市场份额条件下,以最小化新进企业成本为目标提出一种容量设施选址模型;设计一种双向选择机制,以确定设施与消费者之间的服务关系,并基于模拟退火框架,结合双向选择机制给出求解模型的算法;应用数值算例,分析企业市场份额、成本与预期市场份额指标之间的关系,并对原有企业的3种防御性选址策略进行有效性比较.     

Soft computing model based financial aware spatiotemporal social network analysis and visualization for smart cities

The era of intelligence is the development of human science and technology at a higher level, bringing a new layout for the financial market. Then, how to realize the good layout of the financial market in the era of intelligence is an important problem facing all the countries in the world. We in the financial industry as the origin and change as the clue, analyzes the physical outlets as the representative of the financial institutions, banking as standard electronic banking and mobile phone to the bank as the representative of the mobile financial development of three major formats. On this basis, we analyze the current mobile phone terminal model of mobile banking three shortcomings, and propose the new mobile financial formats. This new format is tentatively known as “smart financial format”, it has the equipment personality, wearable, low carbon environmental protection, offline interaction, security, privacy and intelligence, efficiency, and other five major characteristics. In the future, the financial format is likely to be achieved by mobile financial formats to the upgrading of intelligent financial formats, to meet the needs of customers wider and deeper levels. The artificial intelligence method has its advantages in dealing with the problems of the economic system. Therefore, the introduction of artificial intelligence methods into the economic control will become a trend. The proposed model is validated through the public databases to verify the effectiveness.     

A little Birdie told me: Social media,organizational legitimacy,and underpricing in initial public offerings

Drawing on the organizational legitimacy literature, we propose and test a set of hypotheses arguing that social media, an artifact of information technology, serves as a mechanism for conferring legitimacy in the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The extant literature identifies third-party authorities, such as traditional media outlets and industry analysts, as a valuable source of organizational legitimacy. Social media and micro-blogging, however, remain outside current classifications of the phenomenon. This study theoretically develops and empirically tests a new mechanism in the legitimation process: the direct interaction with potential investors and society-at-large via social media. Our findings indicate broad support that having a Twitter account, and the extent to which a firm utilizes Twitter, is associated with systematically higher levels of IPO underpricing. Moreover, we find support that social media variables external to the firm, including number of followers and retweets, also impact the level of underpricing in an IPO. In conclusion, we highlight the emerging role of social media in processes of legitimation and invite additional research at the intersection of IS and management.     

火电厂前端数据采集系统的设计与实现

介绍了火电厂前端数据采集系统的基本功能、系统结构、实现方法及技术性能指标。该系统为重庆远达烟气治理特许经营有限公司脱硫,脱硝特许经营项目提供了大量实时可靠的支撑数据,同时也为现场多种通讯协议的实时数据采集、远程数据传输提供了一种可行的解决方案。     

A new feature selection algorithm and composite neural network for electricity price forecasting

In a competitive electricity market, the forecasting of energy prices is an important activity for all the market participants either for developing bidding strategies or for making investment decisions. In this paper, a new forecast strategy is proposed for day ahead prediction of electricity price, which is a complex signal with nonlinear, volatile and time dependent behavior. Our forecast strategy includes a new two stage feature selection algorithm, a composite neural network (CNN) and a few auxiliary predictors. The feature selection algorithm has two filtering stages to remove irrelevant and redundant candidate inputs, respectively. This algorithm is based on mutual information (MI) criterion and selects the input variables of the CNN among a large set of candidate inputs. The CNN is composed of a few neural networks (NN) with a new data flow among its building blocks. The CNN is the forecast engine of the proposed strategy. A kind of cross-validation technique is also presented to fine-tune the adjustable parameters of the feature selection algorithm and CNN. Moreover, the proposed price forecast strategy is equipped with a few auxiliary predictors to enrich the candidate set of inputs of the forecast engine. The whole proposed strategy is examined on the PJM, Spanish and Californian electricity markets and compared with some of the most recent price forecast methods.     

Optimisation of partner selection and collaborative transportation scheduling in Virtual Enterprises using GA

Partner selection and transportation scheduling are critical to the success of a Virtual Enterprise. Collaborative transportation is a promising strategy that can help many enterprises survive and thrive in today’s highly competitive market. To help decision makers establish and operate Virtual Enterprises more effectively, an innovative decision support system is proposed in this paper. First, new model for integration of partner selection and collaborative transportation scheduling in Virtual Enterprises is developed. This integrated optimisation problem is very dynamic in nature and it is required to optimise a number of interlinked sub-problems at the same time. Then, a novel Genetic Algorithm with a unique dynamic chromosome representation and genetic operations is developed to find an optimal solution to the integrated problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated in a representative case study.     

Ergonomic evaluation and redesign of children bicycles based on anthropometric data

Proper bicycle fit is very important for cycling performance, efficiency, comfort and injury prevention. This is especially true in the case of children cyclists that do not have the necessary cycling experience, balance and the fully developed musculoskeletal system of the adults. Bicycle fit depends on both the design and dimensions of the bicycle as well as on the anthropometric dimensions of the cyclist. In the present paper a case study concerning the ergonomic evaluation and redesign of a series of bicycles for children and teenagers 7-14 years old is presented. The study has been commissioned by a major Greek bicycle manufacturer who wanted to gain competitive advantage by introducing new anthropometrically-designed bicycles. Employing virtual modelling techniques and the method of Principal Component Analysis, bicycle affordance for selected representative cases and various bicycle sizes has been examined. Based on the results of the study redesign recommendations that improved bicycle fit for specific groups were proposed and a formal bicycle size selection method has been defined. The redesigned bicycles are now in full production and distribution is underway in many commercial outlets in Greece.     

Design of microfluidic channel networks with specified output flow rates using the CFD-based optimization method

We report an effective, easy-to-use, computational fluid dynamics-based optimization method for designing purely resistive microfluidic networks with desired flow rates at user-specified outlets. The detailed topology and shape of the microchannel networks are obtained by minimizing the fluidic resistance of channels under a fixed driving flow rate at the inlet. This proposed method allows flexibility in setting up the relative positions among the inlet and outlets so that the layout of channel networks can be compactly adjusted based on the specific design requirements.     

A strategic model using structural equation modeling and fuzzy logic in supplier selection

Supplier selection attained the state of paramount importance for companies in the current scenario because of increasing global competition. Improper selection of suppliers will have an adverse impact on the overall performance of the company. The number of available alternatives in the current market is on a rise, and hence it becomes difficult to select a supplier from among a large lot. An attempt has been made to develop a new composite model using structural equation modeling and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process technique, based on the results of a survey of 151 respondents. Based on the criteria that influence the selection of suppliers, the model has been developed. The study also examines the supplier selection criteria and measures the supplier selection score using the developed model.     

A two phase multi-attribute decision-making approach for new product introduction

This study aims at improving the quality and effectiveness of decision-making in new product introduction. New product development has long been recognized as one of the corporate core functions to be competitive on an increasingly competitive global market. However, developing new products is a process involving risk and uncertainty. In order to solve this stochastic problem, companies need to evaluate their new product initiatives carefully and make accurate decisions. For this reason, a systematic decision process for selecting more rational new product ideas is proposed. Basically, two stages of decision-making are described: the identification of nondominated new product candidates and the selection of the best new product idea. These stages are composed of an integrated approach based on a fuzzy heuristic multi-attribute utility method and a hierarchical fuzzy TOPSIS method. Finally, an application is given to demonstrate the potential of the methodology.     

Evaluation and management of new service concepts: An ANP-based portfolio approach

One of the most crucial decisions in service development is concept selection. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to evaluation of new service concepts (NSCs). This study proposes an analytic network process (ANP) approach to evaluation of NSCs. ANP is a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method that can accommodate interdependency among decision attributes. The proposed approach measures feasibility of NSCs in terms of strategy, technology, market, implementation, and operation. The derived feasibility values of NSC alternatives are then employed to construct the NSC portfolio matrix, together with customers’ preference. The NSC portfolio matrix is expected to aid decision making on concept selection and provide managerial implications for service development. A case of the mobile information and entertainment service is presented to illustrate the proposed approach.