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Full-Text Articles in Business

Single Sourcing Versus Multisourcing: The Roles Of Output Verifiability On Task Modularity, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Alok Gupta, Sameer Hasija Dec 2018

Single Sourcing Versus Multisourcing: The Roles Of Output Verifiability On Task Modularity, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Alok Gupta, Sameer Hasija

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper compares two modes for outsourcing the development of information services projects: single-sourcing (where one vendor handles all outsourced activities) and multisourcing (where multiple vendors handle those activities). We assess the relative efficacy of these two outsourcing modes by identifying the effects of three factors: task modularity, the extent of alignment between a (verifiable) performance metric and project revenue, and the extent to which project revenue is itself verifiable. We find that if tasks are modular then multisourcing strictly dominates single-sourcing—provided the verifiable performance metric and project revenue are not completely aligned. Yet if tasks are integrated, then the …


International Trade In The Alibaba And Amazon Age, Singapore Management University Nov 2018

International Trade In The Alibaba And Amazon Age, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Mindset change is needed to capture shifting value in the value chain; implementing straight-through payment is still an obstacle


Double Learning Or Double Blinding: An Investigation Of Vendor Private Information Acquisition And Consumer Learning Via Online Reviews, Nan Hu, Kevin E. Dow, Alain Yee Loong Chong, Ling Liu Nov 2018

Double Learning Or Double Blinding: An Investigation Of Vendor Private Information Acquisition And Consumer Learning Via Online Reviews, Nan Hu, Kevin E. Dow, Alain Yee Loong Chong, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, building upon information acquisition theory and using portfolio methods and system equations, we made an empirical investigation into how online vendors and consumers are learning from each other, and how online reviews, prices, and sales interact among each other. First, this study shows that vendors acquire information from both private and public channels to learn the quality of their products to make price adjustment. Second, for the more popular products and newly released products, vendors are more motivated to acquire private information that is more precise than the average precision to adjust their price. Third, we document …


Decentralized Planning For Non-Dedicated Agent Teams With Submodular Rewards In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh Sep 2018

Decentralized Planning For Non-Dedicated Agent Teams With Submodular Rewards In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized planning under uncertainty foragent teams is a problem of interest in manydomains including (but not limited to) disaster rescue, sensor networks and security patrolling. Decentralized MDPs, Dec-MDPs havetraditionally been used to represent such decentralized planning under uncertainty problems.However, in many domains, agents may notbe dedicated to the team for the entire timehorizon. For instance, due to limited availability of resources, it is quite common for policepersonnel leaving patrolling teams to attend toaccidents. Such non-dedication can arise dueto the emergence of higher priority tasks ordamage to existing agents. However, there isvery limited literature dealing with handlingof non-dedication in decentralized settings. …


Event-Based Allocation Of Airline Check-In Counters: A Simple Dynamic Optimization Method Supported By Empirical Data, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa Sep 2018

Event-Based Allocation Of Airline Check-In Counters: A Simple Dynamic Optimization Method Supported By Empirical Data, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper studies the real-life problem of dynamically optimizing the number of airport check-in counters to allocate for a single flight. The main feature of our work is the use of empirical data collected at the Singapore Changi Airport, which drives the dynamic optimization model of a parallel queues system. We propose an event-based dynamic programming model that simplifies considerably the optimization analysis even for large-scale problems with 700+ booked passengers. We investigate the following research questions: (a) For a particular flight, what is the optimal number of counters the system should open with and what is the corresponding optimal …


Customer Level Predictive Modeling For Accounts Receivable To Reduce Intervention Actions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Wen Shi Aug 2018

Customer Level Predictive Modeling For Accounts Receivable To Reduce Intervention Actions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Wen Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the main costs associated with Accounts receivable (AR) collection is related to the intervention actions taken to remind customers to pay their outstanding invoices. Apart from the cost, intervention actions may lead to poor customer satisfaction, which is undesirable in a competitive industry. In this paper, we studied the payment behavior of invoices for customers of a logistics company, and used predictive modeling to predict if a customer will pay the outstanding invoices with high probability, in an attempt to reduce intervention actions taken, thus reducing cost and improving customer relationship. We defined a pureness measure to classify …


Experience And Signaling Value In Technology Licensing Contract Payment Structures, Reddi Kotha, Pascale Crama, Phillip H. Kim Aug 2018

Experience And Signaling Value In Technology Licensing Contract Payment Structures, Reddi Kotha, Pascale Crama, Phillip H. Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Whencommercializing technology, the lack of proven results and a reluctance toinvest upfront resources hamper efforts by firms to work jointly with inventorsto bring new discoveries to market. An effective contract payment structure – amix of upfront and royalty payments – can help overcome these hurdles. Weconduct our research in university technology licensing, where licensingmanagers act as intermediaries to unite inventors and licensee firms. Rather than leveraging their experience to bargainfor maximum payments, highly experienced managers offer contractual paymentstructures that trade lower upfront payments for higher royalty payments inorder to signal value. The signal instills confidence in the value of the …


On The Design Of Sparse But Efficient Structures In Operations, Zhenzhen Yan, Sarah Yini Gao, Chung Piaw Teo Jul 2018

On The Design Of Sparse But Efficient Structures In Operations, Zhenzhen Yan, Sarah Yini Gao, Chung Piaw Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is widely believed that a little flexibility added at the right place can reap significant benefits for operations. Unfortunately, despite the extensive literature on this topic, we are not aware of any general methodology that can be used to guide managers in designing sparse (i.e., slightly flexible) and yet efficient operations. We address this issue using a distributionally robust approach to model the performance of a stochastic system under different process structures. We use the dual prices obtained from a related conic program to guide managers in the design process. This leads to a general solution methodology for the …


Reserved Optimization: Handling Incident Priorities In Emergency Response Systems, Muralidhar Konda Konda, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham Jun 2018

Reserved Optimization: Handling Incident Priorities In Emergency Response Systems, Muralidhar Konda Konda, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emergency (medical, fire or criminal) Management Systems(EMSs) are crucial for ensuring public safety and security.Typically in many cities, less than 20% of the cases receivedby EMSs belong to the extremely serious category and require immediate help. Rest of the incidents typically are lessserious and thereby allow more flexibility in response time.Therefore, for efficient management of EMS requests, severalEMSs now categorise an incoming emergency request into apriority level based on well studied “triaging” methods. Leading research on optimising emergency response has either focussed on data-driven models for settings with homogenousincidents or on generic heuristics (that are not data-driven) inmulti-priority incident settings.


Optimization Of A Cyclic Express Subway Service, Hai Wang, Jiangang Jin, Jingfeng Yang Jun 2018

Optimization Of A Cyclic Express Subway Service, Hai Wang, Jiangang Jin, Jingfeng Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With rapid population growth and increasing demand for urban mobility, metropolitan areas such as Singapore, Tokyo, and Shanghai are increasingly dependent on public transport systems. Various strategies are proposed to improve the service quality and capacity of bus and subway systems. Express trains-i.e., trains that skip certain stations-are commonly used, because they can travel at higher speeds, potentially reduce travel time, and serve more passengers. In this paper, we study cyclic express subway service (CESS), in which express trains provide routine transport service with cyclic (periodic) station-skip patterns that can be used in daily service. We propose an exact Mixed …


Optimal Stackelberg Strategies For Financing A Supply Chain Through Online Peer-To-Peer Lending, Guang-Xin Gao, Zhi-Ping Fan, Xin Fang, Yun Fong Lim Jun 2018

Optimal Stackelberg Strategies For Financing A Supply Chain Through Online Peer-To-Peer Lending, Guang-Xin Gao, Zhi-Ping Fan, Xin Fang, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In recent years, supply chain finance (SCF) through online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms has gained its popularity. We study an SCF system with a manufacturer selling a product to a retailer that faces uncertain demand over a single period. We assume that either the retailer or the manufacturer faces a capital constraint and must borrow capital through an online P2P lending platform. The platform determines a service rate for the loan, the manufacturer sets a wholesale price for the product, and the retailer chooses its order quantity for the product. We identify optimal Stackelberg strategies of the participants in the …


Dynamic Inventory Pooling Policies To Deliver Differentiated Service, Yuanguang Zhong, Zhichao Zheng, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo Apr 2018

Dynamic Inventory Pooling Policies To Deliver Differentiated Service, Yuanguang Zhong, Zhichao Zheng, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Resource pooling strategies have been widely used in industry to match supply with demand. However, effective implementation of these strategies can be challenging. Firms need to integrate the heterogeneous service level requirements of different customers into the pooling model and allocate the resources (inventory or capacity) appropriately in the most effective manner. The traditional analysis of inventory pooling, for instance, considers the performance metric in a centralized system and does not address the associated issue of inventory allocation. Using Blackwell’s Approachability Theorem, we derive a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to relate the fill rate requirement of each customer …


Constrained Dual Representation Of Coherent Risk Measures, Marcus Ang, Jie Sun, Qiang Yao Mar 2018

Constrained Dual Representation Of Coherent Risk Measures, Marcus Ang, Jie Sun, Qiang Yao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A classical result in risk measure theory states that every coherent risk measure has a dual representation as the supremum of certain expected value over a risk envelope. We study this topic in more detail. The related issues include: (1) Set operations of risk envelopes and how they change the risk measures, (2) The structure of risk envelopes of popular risk measures, (3) Aversity of risk measures and its impact to risk envelopes, and (4) A connection between risk measures in stochastic optimization and uncertainty sets in robust optimization.


Quadratic Two-Stage Stochastic Optimization With Coherent Measures Of Risk, Jie Sun, Li-Zhi Liao, Brian Rodrigues Mar 2018

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.


On Substitutability And Complementarity In Discrete Choice Models, Guiyun Feng, Xiaobo Li, Zizhuo Wang Jan 2018

On Substitutability And Complementarity In Discrete Choice Models, Guiyun Feng, Xiaobo Li, Zizhuo Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper, we propose the concepts of substitutability and complementarity in discrete choice models. These concepts concern whether the choice probability of one alternative in a choice model increases or decreases with the utility of another alternative, and they play important roles in capturing certain practical choice patterns, such as the halo effect. We study conditions on discrete choice models that will lead to substitutability and complementarity. We also present ways of constructing choice models that exhibit complementary property.