Business Commons^™

Understanding The Impact Of Trade Policy Effect Uncertainty On Firm-Level Innovation Investment: A Deep Learning Approach, Daniel Chang, Nan Hu, Peng Liang, Morgan Swink

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Integrating the real options perspective and resource dependence theory, this study examines how firms adjust their innovation investments to trade policy effect uncertainty (TPEU), a less studied type of firm specific, perceived environmental uncertainty in which managers have difficulty predicting how potential policy changes will affect business operations. To develop a text-based, context-dependent, time-varying measure of firm-level perceived TPEU, we apply Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a state-of-the-art deep learning approach. We apply BERT to analyze the texts of mandatory Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections of annual reports for a sample of 22,669 firm-year observations from 3,181 unique …

Lean Manufacturing Approach To Increase Packaging Efficiency, Lina Gozali, Irsandy Kurniawan, Aldo Salim, Iveline Anne Marie, Benny Tjahjono, Yun Chia Liang, Aldy Gunawan, Nnovia Hardjo Sie, Yuliani Suseno

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The company upon which this paper is based engages in flexible packaging production, especially pharmaceutical products with guaranteed quality, trusted by consumers. Its production process includes printing, laminating, and assembling processes. Production activities are done manually and automatically using machines, so various types of waste are often found in these processes, making the level of plant efficiency nonoptimal. This study aims to identify wastes occurring in the production process, especially the production of pollycelonium with three colour variants as the highest demand product, by applying lean manufacturing concepts. The Current Value Stream Mapping (CVSM) used to map the production process …

Inventory-Responsive Donor-Management Policy: A Tandem Queueing Network Model, Taozeng Zhu, Nicholas Teck Boon Yeo, Sarah Yini Gao, Gar Goei Loke

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: In the blood-donor-management problem, the blood bank incentivizes donors to donate, given blood inventory levels. We propose a model to optimize such incentivization schemes under the context of random demand, blood perishability, observation period between donations, and variability in donor arrivals and dropouts. Methodology/results: We propose an optimization model that simultaneously accounts for the dynamics in the blood inventory and the donor’s donation process, as a coupled queueing network. We adopt the Pipeline Queue paradigm, which leads us to a tractable convex reformulation. The coupled setting requires new methodologies to be developed upon the existing Pipeline Queue framework. …

An Exponential Cone Programming Approach For Managing Electric Vehicle Charging, Li Chen, Long He, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To support the rapid growth in global electric vehicle adoption, public charging of electric vehicles is crucial. We study the problem of an electric vehicle charging service provider, which faces (1) stochastic arrival of customers with distinctive arrival and departure times, and energy requirements as well as (2) a total electricity cost including demand charges, costs related to the highest per-period electricity used in a finite horizon. We formulate its problem of scheduling vehicle charging to minimize the expected total cost as a stochastic program (SP). As this SP is large-scale, we solve it using exponential cone program (ECP) approximations. …

Nudging Social Online Referrals: Evidence From A Randomized Field Experiment, Qian Zeng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the rise of social commerce platforms and customer engagement in online products and services, firms are focusing their attention on effective social online referral program to encourage customers’ online referral behaviors to grow their customer base. Hence, how to influence customers to participate in online referral is a matter of the utmost importance to firms. However, little empirical research has examined the impact of online referral program on customers’ online referral on social commerce platform. To close this research gap, this dissertation investigates the effectiveness of digital nudging for consumers’ social online referral on social commerce platforms.

Working with …

Choice-Based Crowdshipping: A Dynamic Task Display Problem, Alp Arslan, Firat Kilci, Shih-Fen Cheng, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies the integration of the crowd workforce into a generic last-mile delivery setting in which a set of known delivery requests should be fulfilled at a minimum cost. In this setting, the crowd drivers are able to choose to perform a parcel delivery among the available and displayed requests. We specifically investigate the question: what tasks should be displayed to an individual driver, so as to minimize the overall delivery expenses? In contrast to past approaches, where drivers are either (a) given the choice of a single task chosen so as to optimize the platform’s profit, or (b) …

Joint Chance-Constrained Staffing Optimization In Multi-Skill Call Centers, Tien Thanh Dam, Thuy Anh Ta, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper concerns the staffing optimization problem in multi-skill call centers. The objective is to find a minimal cost staffing solution while meeting a target level for the quality of service (QoS) to customers. We consider a staffing problem in which joint chance constraints are imposed on the QoS of the day. Our joint chance-constrained formulation is more rational capturing the correlation between different call types, as compared to separate chance-constrained versions considered in previous studies. We show that, in general, the probability functions in the joint-chance constraints display S-shaped curves, and the optimal solutions should belong to the concave …

Stochastic Knapsack Revisited: The Service Level Perspective, Guodong Lyu, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhichao Zheng, Yuanguang Zhong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A key challenge in the resource allocation problem is to find near-optimal policies to serve different customers with random demands/revenues, using a fixed pool of capacity (properly configured). In this paper, we study the properties of three classes of allocation policies-responsive (with perfect hindsight), adaptive (with information updates), and anticipative (with forecast information) policies. These policies differ in how the information on actual demand and revenue of each customer is being revealed and integrated into the allocation decisions. We show that the analysis of these policies can be unified through the notion of "persistency" (or service level) values-the probability that …

Coordinated Delivery To Shopping Malls With Limited Docking Capacity, Ruidian Song, Hoong Chuin Lau, Xue Luo, Lei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping malls are densely located in major cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Tenants in these shopping malls generate a large number of freight orders to their contracted logistics service providers, who independently plan their own delivery schedules. These uncoordinated deliveries and limited docking capacity jointly cause congestion at the shopping malls. A delivery coordination platform centrally plans the vehicle routes for the logistics service providers and simultaneously schedules the dock time slots at the shopping malls for the delivery orders. Vehicle routing and dock scheduling decisions need to be made jointly against the backdrop of travel time and …

Managing Stochastic Bucket Brigades On Discrete Work Stations, Peng Wang, Kai Pan, Zhenzhen Yan, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Bucket brigades are notably used to coordinate workers in production systems. We study a J-station, I-worker bucket brigade system. The time duration for each worker to serve a job at a station is exponentially distributed with a rate that depends on the station's expected work content and the worker's work speed. Our goal is to maximize the system's productivity or to minimize its inter-completion time variability. We analytically derive the throughput and the coefficient of variation (CV) of the inter-completion time. We study the system under two cases. (i) If the work speeds depend only on the workers, the throughput …

Adopting A Risk-Intelligent Approach To Digital Transformation: Four Traits Of Digitally Mature Organisations, Clarence Goh, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow, Yuanto Kusnadi, Seah Gek Choo, Cheryl Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Our objective is to understand how digitally mature organisations are managing the GRC aspects of their digital transformation programmes, and identify any traits or behaviours that could inform the development of best practices.

We Are On The Way: Analysis Of On-Demand Ride-Hailing Systems, Guiyun Feng, Guangwen Kong, Zizhuo Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: Recently, there has been a rapid rise of on-demand ride-hailing platforms, such as Uber and Didi, which allow passengers with smartphones to submit trip requests and match them to drivers based on their locations and drivers’ availability. This increased demand has raised questions about how such a new matching mechanism will affect the efficiency of the transportation system—in particular, whether it will help reduce passengers’ average waiting time compared with traditional street-hailing systems. Academic/practical relevance: The on-demand ride-hailing problem has gained much academic interest recently. The results we find in the ride-hailing system have a significant …

Multi-Period Lot-Sizing With Supplier Selection: Structural Results, Complexity And Algorithms, Meichun Lin, Woonghee Tim Huh, Guohua Wan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We consider a multi-period lot-sizing problem with multiple products and multiple suppliers. Demand is deterministic and time-varying. The objective is to determine order quantities to minimize the total cost over a finite planning horizon. This problem is strongly NP-hard. For a special case, we extend the classical zero-inventory-ordering principle and solve it by dynamic programming. Based on this new extension, we also develop a heuristic algorithm for the general problem and computationally show that it works well.

Urban Consolidation Center Or Peer-To-Peer Platform? The Solution To Urban Last-Mile Delivery, Qiyuan Deng, Xin Fang, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The growing population in cities and booming e-commerce activities create huge demand for urban last-mile delivery, exerting intense pressure on the cities' well-being. To keep congestion and pollution under control, a consolidator can operate an urban consolidation center (UCC) to bundle shipments from multiple carriers before the last-mile delivery. Alternatively, the consolidator can operate a peer-to-peer platform for the carriers to share delivery capacity. We provide guidance for the consolidator to choose between these two business models by comparative analysis. We capture the interactions between the consolidator and carriers using a game-theoretical framework. Under each business model, the consolidator first …

What Tesla’S $1.5 Billion Bet On Bitcoin Means For Crypto Legitimacy, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Some significant issues need to be resolved before Tesla can accept Bitcoin as a legitimate method of payment, says UNSW Business School's Mark Humphery-Jenner

Flexibly Serving A Finite Number Of Heterogeneous Jobs In A Tandem System, Yun Fong Lim, Bingnan Lu, Rowan Wang, Wenjia Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many manufacturing and service systems require a finite number of heterogeneous jobs to be processed by two stations in tandem. Each station serves at most one job at a time and there is a finite buffer between the two stations. We consider two flexible servers that are cross-trained to work at both stations. The duration for a server to finish a job at a station is exponentially distributed with a rate that depends on the server, the station, and the job. Our goal is to identify an efficient policy to dynamically assign the servers to the stations such that the …

Learning From Digital Failures? The Effectiveness Of Firms’ Divestiture And Management Turnover Responses To Data Breaches, Gui-Deng Say, Gurneeta Vasudeva

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine whether firms learn from digital technology failures in the form of data breach events, based on the effectiveness of their failure responses. We argue that firms experiencing such technological failures interpret them broadly as organizational problems, and undertake unrelated divestitures and top management turnover to achieve better standardization and to remove dysfunctional routines. We test our hypotheses on unrelated subsidiary divestitures and chief technology officer (CTO) turnovers undertaken by 8,760 publicly traded U.S. firms that were at risk of experiencing data breaches in- volving the loss of personally identifiable information during the period 2005–2016. We find that data …

When The Bank Comes To You: Branch Network And Customer Omnichannel Banking Behavior, Mi Zhou, Dan Geng, Vibhanshu Abhishek, Beibei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Banks today have been increasingly reducing their physical presence and redirecting customers to digital channels, and yet, the consequences of this strategy are not well studied. This paper investigates the effects of banks' branch network changes (i.e., branch openings and branch closures) on customer omnichannel banking behavior. Using approximately 0.85 million (33 months') anonymized individual-level banking transactions from a large commercial bank in the United States, this paper shows the asymmetric effects of branch openings and branch closures on customer omnichannel banking behavior. In particular, we find that branch openings increase customers' branch transactions; however, the first branch opening leads …

Vehicle Routing Problem For Multi-Product Cross-Docking, Aldy Gunawan, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Benjamin Gan, Vincent F. Yu, Panca Jodiawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-docking is a logistic technique that can reduce costs occurred in a supply chain network while increasing the flow of goods, thus shortening the shipping cycle. Inside a cross-dock facility, the goods are directly transferred from incoming vehicles to outgoing vehicles without storing them in-between. Our research extends and combines this cross-docking technique with a well-known logistic problem, the vehicle routing problem (VRP), for delivering multiple products and addresses it as the VRP for multi-product cross-docking (VRP-MPCD). We developed a mixed integer programming model and generated two sets of VRP-MPCD instances, which are based on VRPCD instances. The instances are …

Optimizing Impression Counts For Outdoor Advertising, Yipeng Zhang, Yuchen Li, Zhifeng Bao, Songsong Mo, Ping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we propose and study the problem of optimizing theinfluence of outdoor advertising (ad) when impression counts aretaken into consideration. Given a database U of billboards, each ofwhich has a location and a non-uniform cost, a trajectory databaseT and a budget B, it aims to find a set of billboards that has themaximum influence under the budget. In line with the advertisingconsumer behavior studies, we adopt the logistic function to takeinto account the impression counts of an ad (placed at differentbillboards) to a user trajectory when defining the influence measurement. However, this poses two challenges: (1) our problemis …

Correlation-Sensitive Next-Basket Recommendation, Duc Trong Le, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Items adopted by a user over time are indicative ofthe underlying preferences. We are concerned withlearning such preferences from observed sequencesof adoptions for recommendation. As multipleitems are commonly adopted concurrently, e.g., abasket of grocery items or a sitting of media consumption, we deal with a sequence of baskets asinput, and seek to recommend the next basket. Intuitively, a basket tends to contain groups of relateditems that support particular needs. Instead of recommending items independently for the next basket, we hypothesize that incorporating informationon pairwise correlations among items would help toarrive at more coherent basket recommendations.Towards this objective, we develop a …

Forecasting In Blockchain-Based Local Energy Markets, Michael Kostmann, Wolfgang Karl Hardle

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Increasingly volatile and distributed energy production challenges traditional mechanisms to manage grid loads and price energy. Local energy markets (LEMs) may be a response to those challenges as they can balance energy production and consumption locally and may lower energy costs for consumers. Blockchain-based LEMs provide a decentralized market to local energy consumer and prosumers. They implement a market mechanism in the form of a smart contract without the need for a central authority coordinating the market. Recently proposed blockchain-based LEMs use auction designs to match future demand and supply. Thus, such blockchain-based LEMs rely on accurate short-term forecasts of …

Coordinating Supply And Demand On An On-Demand Service Platform With Impatient Customers, Jiaru Bai, Kut C. So, Christopher S. Tang, Xiqun Chen, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider an on-demand service platform using earning sensitive independent providers with heterogeneous reservation price (for work participation) to serve its time and price sensitive customers with heterogeneous valuation of the service. As such, both the supply and demand are "endogenously'' dependent on the price the platform charges its customers and the wage the platform pays its independent providers. We present an analytical model with endogenous supply (number of participating agents) and endogenous demand (customer request rate) to study this on-demand service platform. To coordinate endogenous demand with endogenous supply, we include the steady-state waiting time performance based on a …

Blockchain Based Efficient And Robust Fair Payment For Outsourcing Services In Cloud Computing, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Ximeng Liu, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an attractive business model of cloud computing, outsourcing services usually involve online payment and security issues. The mutual distrust between users and outsourcing service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing payment solutions only consider a specific type of outsourcing service and rely on a trusted third-party to realize fairness. In this paper, in order to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third-party, trusted or not, we introduce BCPay, a blockchain based fair payment framework for outsourcing services in cloud computing. We first present the …

The Technology Tide: Has It Hit The Shores Of Social Innovation?, Andrew Koh

Social Space

“We want a nice colour and it must look modern.”

That was the feedback some villagers gave during a design-thinking exercise regarding sanitation facilities. Although this took place several years ago, as part of my previous work in the international development sector, I remember the experience vividly. It struck me that most people—village-dwellers or Singaporeans alike—have similar aspirations for a better quality of living.

Easy Does It: Blockchain-Based Solutions For The Future, David Wong, Freddy Setiawan, Alvin Yong

Social Space

y now, most people are aware of Bitcoin and its meteoric rise in value. What is less known, however, is its underpinning technology, blockchain. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that records virtually all types of transactions.This distributed nature is reflected in itsphysical architecture, and is one of the main reasons for its strong resistance to hacking and its immutable nature.

All Systems Go: Building An Internet For Good, Sylvia Cadena

Social Space

The Internet has supercharged our ability to achieve development targets. Digital solutions, from both the public and private sectors, can facilitate unprecedented access to government and social services, banking andfinance, telehealth and well-being,education and training, employment opportunities, as well as create business opportunities.

Soa Maturity Influence On Digital Banking Transformation, Alan Megargel, Venky Shankararaman, Terence P. C. Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital Banking is an evolution of online banking, where the banks attempt to further enhance customer experience by integrating digital technologies such as mobile technology, social media and analytics. Traditional banks have the highest barriers to entry into the digital banking market due to the presence of legacy core banking systems. These legacy systems while still high performing and reliable, are inflexible to change and are not easily integrated to the modern application systems needed for delivering digital banking services across multiple online banking channels. One solution that is widely adopted in the industry to overcome this obstacle is the …

From Digital Traces To Marketing Insights: Recovering Consumer Preferences For Digital Entertainment Services And Online Shopping, Ai Phuong Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

IT innovations disrupt traditional business models and challenge conventional thinking. Thus, industry incumbents face fierce competition from start-ups with new business models and new ways of engaging customers. Digital entertainment goods and personalized services have become a lucrative market, which has undergone a transformation enabled by seamless Internet connections. Meanwhile, social networks and other online platforms have brought people and business even closer.

Quadratic Two-Stage Stochastic Optimization With Coherent Measures Of Risk, Jie Sun, Li-Zhi Liao, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A new scheme to cope with two-stage stochastic optimization problems uses a risk measure as the objective function of the recourse action, where the risk measure is defined as the worst-case expected values over a set of constrained distributions. This paper develops an approach to deal with the case where both the first and second stage objective functions are convex linear-quadratic. It is shown that under a standard set of regularity assumptions, this two-stage quadratic stochastic optimization problem with measures of risk is equivalent to a conic optimization problem that can be solved in polynomial time.