Pricing strategies with reference effects in competitive industries

This paper examines the effect of reference prices on companies operating within competitive industries. We confirm that even with competition, firms optimally price high in the short term to generate a high reference price and then decrease this price over time. Competitors' prices converge toward each other over time, emphasizing the short‐term nature of reference prices. We then show that pricing optimally to take advantage of reference prices generates a positive externality for other firms in an industry, such that competitors may generate higher profit. The longer the focus of a given firm, the more profit the firm generates, but less relative to its competitors. This arises because the externalities created through pricing high to increase reference prices outweigh the benefits of the higher reference prices themselves. If pricing managers are compensated relative to their competition, this suggests that short‐termism may be implicitly encouraged to the detriment of profit.     

我国个人所得税功能定位问题的思考

2009年我国税改的主基调是结构性减税,对于个人所得税改革的研究成为各界普遍关注的焦点之一。文章旨在探讨个税改革的一个前提性问题,即:我国个税的功能定位问题。文章借鉴西方经验,结合我国实际认为,现阶段个税成为我国税收体系主体税种的条件尚不具备,因此,目前我国个税应以调节收入分配功能优先。     

A note on the optimal pricing and production decisions with price‐driven substitution

Recently, Kim and Bell ( 2011 ) developed a revenue managemnent pricing model with price‐driven substitution. The authors considered production decisions under unlimited production capacity and investigated the impact of price‐driven substitution on a firm's pricing and production decisions. The authors modeled the consumer demands for each market segment as linear additive demand function based on exogenous variables, where demand substitution occurred as a function of price differences between the two products. In this article, we extend this work to examine the impact of a production capacity constraint on the firm's joint pricing and inventory decisions. Based on this extended model, we investigate the impact of price‐driven substitution on a firm's pricing and production decisions where there is a limit on total capacity. We show how revenue managers should adjust prices and production levels to take into account price‐driven substitution under a capacity constraint setting. Both deterministic and stochastic models are developed, and the impact of price‐driven substitution and a capacity constraint on the optimal prices, production levels, and revenues is illustrated.     

Optimal cycle time and inventory decisions in coordinated and non-coordinated two-echelon inventory system under inflation and time value of money

In this paper, a mathematical model is developed for a coordinated and non-coordinated two-echelon inventory system comprising of a single manufacturer and a single retailer. The objective of the model is to demonstrate the optimality of cycle time and inventory decisions under the phenomena of different inflation rates at the manufacturer and retailer points. Also, it is aimed at determining the annual net revenue of the supply chain (SC). In the proposed model, the present value of the inflated ordering/set-up costs, purchase/unit costs, carrying costs and the gross revenue is computed for the retailer, manufacturer and the SC. A numerical example is devised to illustrate the optimality of decision variables and the objective function. Also, the sensitivity analysis is carried out. Results show that the present value of the annual net revenue of the retailer, manufacturer and SC decreases with increased inflation rate at the retailer and decreased inflation rate at the manufacturer simultaneously.     

Dynamic admission control for two customer classes with stochastic demands and strict due dates

We study a dynamic capacity allocation problem with admission control decisions of a company that caters for two demand classes with random arrivals, capacity requirements and strict due dates. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) in order to find the optimal admission control policy that maximises the expected profit of the company. Such a formulation suffers a state-space explosion. Moreover, it involves an additional dimension arising from the multiple possible order sizes that customers can request which further increases the complexity of the problem. To reduce the cardinality of possible policies, and, thus, the computational requirements, we propose a threshold-based policy. We formulate an MDP to generate such a policy. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we develop threshold-based approximate algorithms based on the state-reduction heuristics with aggregation proposed previously. Our results reveal that for the majority of instances considered the optimal policy has a threshold structure. We then demonstrate the superiority of the proposed threshold-based approximate algorithms over two benchmark policies in terms of the generated profits and the robustness of the solutions to changes in operational conditions. Finally, we show that our proposed policies are also robust to changes in actual demand from its estimation.     

考虑通关水平的跨境物流服务供应链契约协调机制研究

为实现跨境物流服务供应链完全协调,运用Stackelberg博弈理论,构建由一个跨境物流服务供应商与一个物流服务集成商组成的二级供应链。采用因子分析法测度通关水平,分析通关水平对跨境物流服务供应链最优决策及协调运作的影响,设计可供跨境物流服务供应链完美协调的契约机制。研究表明,考虑通关水平使跨境物流服务供应链成员及供应链整体利润均得到提升;集中决策下跨境物流服务供应链整体利润总是高于分散决策;收益共享契约可实现跨境物流服务供应商及供应链整体决策的帕累托优化,但不能达到供应链的完全协调,而Nash协商改进的二部定价契约模型可实现供应链的完全协调。     

Supply chain network equilibrium with revenue sharing contract under demand disruptions

Contract is a common and effective mechanism for supply chain coordination, which has been studied extensively in recent years. For a supply chain network model, contracts can be used to coordinate it because it is too ideal to obtain the network equilibrium state in practical market competition. In order to achieve equilibrium, we introduce revenue sharing contract into a supply chain network equilibrium model with random demand in this paper. Then, we investigate the influence on this network equilibrium state from demand disruptions caused by unexpected emergencies. When demand disruptions happen, the supply chain network equilibrium state will be broken and change to a new one, so the decision makers need to adjust the contract parameters to achieve the new coordinated state through bargaining. Finally, a numerical example with a sudden demand increase as a result of emergent event is provided for illustrative purposes.     

Shrinking‐horizon dynamic programming

We describe a heuristic control policy for a general finite‐horizon stochastic control problem, which can be used when the current process disturbance is not conditionally independent of the previous disturbances, given the current state. At each time step, we approximate the distribution of future disturbances (conditioned on what has been observed) by a product distribution with the same marginals. We then carry out dynamic programming (DP), using this modified future disturbance distribution, to find an optimal policy, and in particular, the optimal current action. We then execute only the optimal current action. At the next step, we update the conditional distribution, and repeat the process, this time with a horizon reduced by one step. (This explains the name ‘shrinking‐horizon dynamic programming’). We explain how the method can be thought of as an extension of model predictive control, and illustrate our method on two variations on a revenue management problem. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creating the Enabling Environment for More Transparent and Better-resourced Local Governments: A Case of E-taxation in the Philippines

This research joins the growing body of literature that advocates for the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in local governance more particularly in public financial management. Using a case study in Bohol, a province in the Philippines, this paper discusses the impact of ICT on local revenue generation by analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data from 15 municipalities which used e-taxation. This paper argues that the use of ICT can make possible more transparent and accountable revenue generation systems to benefit both government and taxpayers. However, these results are differentiated depending on the level of political leadership, the nature of articulation of the demand for ICT use, the ratio of benefit against cost, and the availability of technical skills and resources at the sub-national level. It is within this context that an eco-system analysis is argued to be useful in analyzing how ICT can be adopted, scaled, and used by sub-national governments to achieve better governance.     

航空货运收益管理动态定价模型

结合国内航空货运的实际情况,应用价格需求弹性系数理论和博弈理论,考虑了货物体积、重量的约束及因定价差异引起的航空公司市场份额的变动,以航空公司利益最大化为目标,建立了在竞争市场环境下多家航空公司货物多级运价动态模型,探讨了模型求解的方法,求出航空货运定价的均衡解。通过数值算例的形式不仅展示了模型在实际操作中应用的流程,而且对比了均衡策略与其他策略,结果表明,均衡策略优于其他策略。