Decision Making & Negotiations

According to human capital theory, technological change will influence the retirement decisions of older workers in two ways. First, workers in industries with high rates of technological change will retire later if there is a net positive correlation between technological change and on-the-job training. Second, an unexpected change in the rate of technological change will induce older workers to retire sooner because the required amount of retraining will be an unattractive investment.

While under some circumstances information sharing in oligopoly may be beneficial, the literature ignores the possibility of strategic information sharing by assuming verifiability of data. I endogenize the incentives for truthful information sharing and prove that if firms have the ability to send misleading information, they will always do so. To overcome this problem I introduce a (costly) mechanism through which the firm will, in its own best interest, reveal the true value of its private information, even though outside verification is impossible.

Edited by John R. White.

This paper documents the revaluation practice over a ten-year period from 1981 of a large sample of Australian firms and examines the association between these revaluations and stock market prices and returns. The analysis uses several different approaches in order to obtain a thorough understanding of the reevaluation process in Australia. We include a description of hand-collected data from published financial statements, follow-up interviews with chief financial officers of the sample firms, and association tests between hand-collected accounting data and stock market measures.

In this chapter we discuss planning models for multi-echelon systems which allow for uncertain and nonstationary demand and lead time processes. We confine ourselves to so-called PUSH systems with a central decision maker, who possesses continuously or periodically updated information about all inventories of all products at all relevant facilities and production stages; all replenishment decisions in the system are determined centrally on the basis of this information.

We develop a simple O(n log n) solution method for the standard lot-sizing model with backlogging and a study horizon of n periods. Production costs are fixed plus linear and holding and backlogging costs are linear with general time-dependent parameters. The algorithm has linear [O(n)] time complexity for several important subclasses of the general model. We show how a slight adaptation of the algorithm can be used for the detection of a minimal forecast horizon and associated planning horizon.

We consider an inventory system with compound Poisson demands replenished by discrete production of units on a single-server facility. This facility may start a vacation at any production completion epoch; at the completion of a vacation the inventory level is inspected to decide whether or not to resume production. Unit production and vacation times are independent and identically distributed with general distributions.

We consider distribution systems with a single depot and many retailers each of which faces external demands for a single item that occurs at a specific deterministic demand rate. All stock enters the systems through the depot where it can be stored and then picked up and distributed to the retailers by a fleet of vehicles, combining deliveries into efficient routes. We extend earlier methods for obtaining low complexity lower bounds and heuristics for systems without central stock.

Manufacturing and service organizations routinely face the challenge of scheduling jobs, orders, or individual customers in a schedule that optimizes either (i) an aggregate efficiency measure, (ii) a measure of performance balance, or (iii) some combination of these two objectives. We address these questions for single-machine job scheduling systems with fixed or controllable due dates.