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Full-Text Articles in Business

Urban Consolidation Center Or Peer-To-Peer Platform? The Solution To Urban Last-Mile Delivery, Qiyuan Deng, Xin Fang, Yun Fong Lim Dec 2019

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

Booming e-commerce activities further increase this demand, exerting intense pressure on the cities' well-being. To build a city with 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 their delivery capacity. Our objective is to compare the performance of these two business models. Under each business model, we study the interactions between a consolidator and multiple carriers using a two-period game-theoretical model. In each period, the consolidator first chooses a delivery fee …


How To Optimize Storage Classes In A Unit-Load Warehouse, Marcus Ang, Yun Fong Lim Oct 2019

How To Optimize Storage Classes In A Unit-Load Warehouse, Marcus Ang, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study a problem of optimizing storage classes in a unit-load warehouse such that the total travel cost is minimized. This is crucial to the operational efficiency of unit-load warehouses, which constitute a crit- ical part of a supply chain. We propose a novel approach called the FB method to solve the problem. The FB method is suitable for general receiving-dock and shipping-dock locations that may not coincide. The FB method first ranks the locations according to the frequencies that they are visited, which are estimated by a linear program based on the warehouse’s layout as well as the products’ …


Effects Of Rescheduling On Patient No-Show Behavior In Outpatient Clinics, Jiayi Liu, Jingui Xie, Kum Khiong Yang, Zhichao Zheng Sep 2019

Effects Of Rescheduling On Patient No-Show Behavior In Outpatient Clinics, Jiayi Liu, Jingui Xie, Kum Khiong Yang, Zhichao Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the effects of rescheduling on no-show behavior in an outpatient appointment system for both new and follow-up patients. Previous literature has primarily focused on new patients and investigated the role of waiting time on no-show probability. We offer a more nuanced understanding of this costly phenomenon. Using comprehensive clinical data, we demonstrate that for follow-up patients, their no-show probability decreases by 10.9 percentage points if their appointments were rescheduled at their own request, but increases by 6.2 percentage points if they were rescheduled by the clinic. New patients, in contrast, are more concerned about waiting time and less …


Capacity Allocation In Flexible Production Networks: Theory And Applications, Guodong Lyu, Wang-Chi Cheung, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhichao Zheng, Yuanguang Zhong Sep 2019

Capacity Allocation In Flexible Production Networks: Theory And Applications, Guodong Lyu, Wang-Chi Cheung, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhichao Zheng, Yuanguang Zhong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In many production environments, a fixed network of capacity is shared flexibly between multiple products with random demands. What is the best way to configure the capacity of the production network and to allocate the available capacity, to meet pre-determined fill rate requirements? We develop a new approach for network capacity configuration and allocation, and characterize the relationship between the capacity of the network and the attainable fill rate levels for the products, taking into account the flexibility structure of the network. This builds on a new randomized allocation mechanism to deliver the desired services.We use this theory to investigate …


Technology Specifications And Production Timing In A Co-Opetitive Supply Chain, Baozhuang Niu, Kanglin Chen, Xin Fang, Xiaohang Yue, Xin Wang Aug 2019

Technology Specifications And Production Timing In A Co-Opetitive Supply Chain, Baozhuang Niu, Kanglin Chen, Xin Fang, Xiaohang Yue, Xin Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Motivated by Google’s technology specifications on Android devices, we consider firms’ decisions on production timing in a co-opetitive supply chain comprising a manufacturer and an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), where the manufacturer acts as the OEM’s upstream contract manufacturer and downstream competitor. We consider the market acceptance uncertainty of key product designs. If a firm decides to implement ex post production strategy (PS), it can delay the production until the market acceptance uncertainty of its product is resolved. Otherwise, ex-ante production strategy (AS) is implemented. We find that, due to the co-opetition, PS does not always benefit either the manufacturer …


Modeling Newsvendor Behavior: A Prospect Theory Approach, Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Sameer Hasija Jul 2019

Modeling Newsvendor Behavior: A Prospect Theory Approach, Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Sameer Hasija

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: Studies have shown that the behavior of subjects in newsvendor experiments is not consistent with expected profit maximization - an assumption that is often made in operations management literature. Although prospect theory has been established as a popular model of behavioral decision making under uncertainty, it was considered to be inconsistent with observed newsvendor behavior (in particular, the pull-to-center effect) until a recent study proposed a prospect theory model that is consistent with the pull-to-center effect; however, this model's ability in representing newsvendor behavior compared to other plausible prospect theory models is unexplored in the literature. This paper …


Understanding The Operating Landscape Of The Global Airline Industry: A Dea Integrated Alternating Conditional Expectation Approach, Joyce M. W. Low, Kum Khiong Yang Jun 2019

Understanding The Operating Landscape Of The Global Airline Industry: A Dea Integrated Alternating Conditional Expectation Approach, Joyce M. W. Low, Kum Khiong Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: This study investigates the relationships between service efficiency in 5 major cost centres (namely, business orientation, network coverage, physical resources, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and human resources) and profitability in the global airline industry. Design/methodology: The study integrates the Slack-based Model (SBM) of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Alternating Conditional Expectation (ACE) regression to understand the relationships between an airline’s profitability and its efficiencies in 5 identified operations areas. Findings: Based on the observational data obtained from 75 international airlines, the relationships between operational performances and profitability are found to be curvilinear and contingent on an airline’s …


Crop Planning In Sustainable Agriculture: Dynamic Farmland Allocation In The Presence Of Crop Rotation Benefits, Onur Boyabatli, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou May 2019

Crop Planning In Sustainable Agriculture: Dynamic Farmland Allocation In The Presence Of Crop Rotation Benefits, Onur Boyabatli, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines crop planning decision in sustainable agriculture---that is, how to allocate farmland among multiple crops in each growing season when the crops have rotation benefits across growing seasons. We consider a farmer who periodically allocates the farmland between two crops in the presence of revenue uncertainty where revenue is stochastically larger and farming cost is lower when a crop is grown on rotated farmland (where the other crop was grown in the previous season). We characterize the optimal dynamic farmland allocation policy and perform sensitivity analysis to investigate how revenue uncertainty of each crop affects the farmer's optimal …


Combating Child Labor: Incentives And Information Disclosure In Global Supply Chains, Soo-Haeng Cho, Xin Fang, Sridhar Tayur, Ying Xu May 2019

Combating Child Labor: Incentives And Information Disclosure In Global Supply Chains, Soo-Haeng Cho, Xin Fang, Sridhar Tayur, Ying Xu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: We investigate multinational firms’ inspection and pricing strategies to address the challenges of combating child labor in global supply chains. We also examine how several factors (such as information disclosure, goodwill loss, inspection cost, external monitoring by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and penalty scheme) affect firms’ incentives to use different strategies to combat child labor. Academic/practical relevance: Nearly 200 million children are engaged in child labor, many in developing countries that are part of the supply base of global manufacturing networks. However, there has been little research on evaluating the impact of firms’ strategies and NGOs’ initiatives …


Disruption Risk Mitigation In Supply Chains: The Risk Exposure Index Revisited, Sarah Yini Gao, David Simchi-Levi, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhenzhen Yan May 2019

Disruption Risk Mitigation In Supply Chains: The Risk Exposure Index Revisited, Sarah Yini Gao, David Simchi-Levi, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhenzhen Yan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Simchi-Levi et al. (2014, 2015a) proposed a novel approach using the Time-To-Recover (TTR) parameters to analyze the Risk Exposure Index (REI) of supply chains under disruption. This approach is able to capture the cascading effects of disruptions in the supply chains, albeit in simplified environments -- TTRs are deterministic, and at most one node in the supply chain can be disrupted. In this paper, we proposed a new method to integrate probabilistic assessment of disruption risks into the REI approach and measure supply chain resiliency by analyzing the Worst-case CVaR (WCVaR) of total lost sales under disruptions.We show that the …


Managing Wind-Based Electricity Generation In The Presence Of Storage And Transmission Capacity, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou, Alan Scheller-Wolf, Nicola Secomandi, Stephen Smith Apr 2019

Managing Wind-Based Electricity Generation In The Presence Of Storage And Transmission Capacity, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou, Alan Scheller-Wolf, Nicola Secomandi, Stephen Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the management of a merchant wind energy farm co‐located with a grid‐level storage facility and connected to a market through a transmission line. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with stochastic wind speed and electricity prices. Consistent with most deregulated electricity markets, our model allows these prices to be negative. As this feature makes it difficult to characterize any optimal policy of our MDP, we show the optimality of a stage‐ and partial‐state‐dependent‐threshold policy when prices can only be positive. We extend this structure when prices can also be negative to develop heuristic one …


Corn, Soybeans Or Fallow: Dynamic Farmland Allocation Under Uncertainty, Onur Boyabatli, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou Mar 2019

Corn, Soybeans Or Fallow: Dynamic Farmland Allocation Under Uncertainty, Onur Boyabatli, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter develops a theoretical basis for understanding the trade-offs facing a farmer for allocating his farmland among several crops over multiple growing seasons. Specifically, we focus on the farmland allocation among two cash crops (corn and soybeans) and letting the farmland lay fallow to rejuvenate the soil and increase the revenue for the crop grown on this farmland in the subsequent seasons. In each growing period, the farmer chooses the allocation in the presence of revenue uncertainty for each cash crop, and crop rotation benefits across periods, where revenue is stochastically larger and farming cost is lower when a …


Selling Off-Grid Light To Liquidity Constrained Consumers, Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Ioana Popescu, Serguei Netessine Mar 2019

Selling Off-Grid Light To Liquidity Constrained Consumers, Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Ioana Popescu, Serguei Netessine

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: A large proportion of the world’s population has no access to electricity and so relies on noxious kerosene for their lighting needs. Solar-based solutions require a large up-front investment and are often unaffordable in this market owing to consumers’ tight liquidity constraints. As an alternative, there are business models relying on rechargeable light bulbs that are sold at a subsidized price (which renders them affordable) and require regular micropayments for recharges (which eases liquidity constraints). These bulbs provide a cheaper and healthier light source than kerosene, yet their adoption is lower than expected, and some consumers continue …


Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu Mar 2019

Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Companies struggle with timely project execution despite employing sophisticated management methods. Although help across projects is critical for time performance, it has not been explicitly incorporated into project management (PM) systems. We model a PM system, based on an innovative real-life practice, that both incorporates and shapes project managers’ helping behavior. A help process is at the core of this system, in which project managers may ask for and provide help while top management facilitates such exchanges. We find that companies should take a nuanced approach when designing help exchange and time-based incentives in tandem. A company that faces high …


Installed Base Management Versus Selling In Monopolistic And Competitive Environments, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Andreas Robotis, Wassenhove Luk N. V. Van Mar 2019

Installed Base Management Versus Selling In Monopolistic And Competitive Environments, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Andreas Robotis, Wassenhove Luk N. V. Van

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper compares the policy of selling a product to that of installed base management, in which the manufacturer leases the product to consumers, and bundles repair and maintenance services along with the product. We compare the two policies in a monopolistic setting when a firm uses either one of the policies, and when both policies are used by a single firm. We then compare the policies under competition first when two firms use identical products, and when two firms use vertically differentiated products. Our findings indicate that the selling option dominates the installed base option in a monopolistic environment, …


Is Promoting Public Transit An Effective Intervention For Obesity? A Longitudinal Study Of The Relation Between Public Transit Usage And Obesity, Zhaowei She, Douglas M. King, Jacobson H. Sheldon Jan 2019

Is Promoting Public Transit An Effective Intervention For Obesity? A Longitudinal Study Of The Relation Between Public Transit Usage And Obesity, Zhaowei She, Douglas M. King, Jacobson H. Sheldon

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There is increasing evidence on the association between public transit usage and obesity. To further understand the causal impact of changes in county public transit usage on county obesity rates, this paper presents a longitudinal study on this topic. Annual health data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and transportation data from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) were aggregated and matched at the county level, to create a panel data set with 227 counties from 45 states across two time periods, 2001 and 2009. Annual public transit funding, obtained from the National Transit Database (NTD), is chosen …