Acyclic Mechanism Design for Freight Consolidation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wentao Zhang ◽  
Nelson A. Uhan ◽  
Maged Dessouky ◽  
Alejandro Toriello
Keyword(s):  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Bin Packing ◽  
Noncooperative Game ◽  
Budget Balance ◽  
Freight Consolidation ◽  
Shipping Cost ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
Effectiveness And Efficiency ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Better Than

Freight consolidation is a logistics practice that improves the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of transportation operations, and also reduces energy consumption and carbon footprint. A “fair” shipping cost-sharing scheme is indispensable to help establish and sustain the cooperation of a group of suppliers in freight consolidation. In this paper, we design a truthful acyclic mechanism to solve the cost-sharing problem in a freight consolidation system with one consolidation center and one common destination. Applying the acyclic mechanism, the consolidation center decides which suppliers’ demands ship via the consolidation center and their corresponding cost shares based on their willingness to pay for the service. The proposed acyclic mechanism is designed based on bin packing solutions that are also strong Nash equilibria for a related noncooperative game. We study the budget-balance of the mechanism both theoretically and numerically. We prove a 2-budget-balance guarantee for the mechanism in general and better budget-balance guarantees under specific problem settings. Empirical tests on budget-balance show that our mechanism performs much better than the guaranteed budget-balance ratio. We also study the economic efficiency of our mechanism numerically to investigate its impact on social welfare under different conditions.

scholarly journals Cooperation Contracts Between Small and Major Scenic Spots in Peak Seasons

SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401986148
Author(s):  
Chenchen Yang ◽  
Junfeng Dong ◽  
Jingjing Hao
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Revenue Sharing ◽  
Healthy Development ◽  
Supply Chain Efficiency ◽  
Scenic Spot ◽  
Cooperation Model ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Tourism Supply Chain ◽  
Better Than

This study discusses the cooperation model between the small and major scenic spots in peak seasons of tourism. First, we create a tourism supply chain that contains only one major and one small scenic spots to divert some tourists to a nearby scenic spot, reduce large scenic spot pressure, increase the benefits of small scenic spots, and promote the healthy development of the tourism supply chain. Second, we build two cooperation models between the major and the small scenic spots: the revenue-sharing model and the cost-sharing model. Based on a numerical analysis, we give a more clear comparison about the revenue changes and the overall efficiency changes of the tourism supply chain in these two models. Our results confirm that the cost-sharing model is an ideal cooperation model. In the cost-sharing model, the two parties’ revenues in the tourism supply chain are better than those in the revenue-sharing model, and the entire supply chain efficiency could be improved.

Renovating the View of Cost Sharing for the Underground Low Voltage Cable Projects in Hanoi

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (5E) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pham Thi Thu Ha ◽  
Phan Dieu Huong
Keyword(s):  
Willingness To Pay ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Low Voltage ◽  
Power Grid ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Power Industry ◽  
Well Field ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sharing Responsibility ◽  
The Cost

Underground power grid projects in Hanoi is so urgent that it requires immediate implementation. To synchronously and quickly implement the underground power grid projects, people in charge should not follow the outdated perspectives of just including the power industry, but also need to call for the support and cost sharing responsibility from consumers. This paper aims at approaching the subject both from the producers and consumers’ perspectives to together sharing the cost of putting the power grid underground not only in Hanoi but other metropolitans in Vietnam as well. Field studies (including 104 families) at Hoan Kiem District, Hanoi and CBA method were applied to investigate the willingness to pay (WTP) level of consumers to share the cost with the power industry for the underground power grid projects in Hanoi. The overview of the results shows that cost for the underground power grid in Hoan Kiem District ranging from 30,000 VND/household/month to 46,000VND/household/month. On the other hand, the willingness to pay of a typical household of four people within Hoan Kiem District ranges from 17,000VND/month to 24,000VND/month, with the most favorable method of annual payment within a detailed timeline.

scholarly journals Telecom Churn Prediction System Based on Ensemble Learning Using Feature Grouping

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 4742
Author(s):  
Tianpei Xu ◽  
Ying Ma ◽  
Kangchul Kim
Keyword(s):  
Ensemble Learning ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Customer Relationship ◽  
Prediction System ◽  
Churn Prediction ◽  
Customer Churn ◽  
Feature Grouping ◽  
Recognition Systems ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Better Than

In recent years, the telecom market has been very competitive. The cost of retaining existing telecom customers is lower than attracting new customers. It is necessary for a telecom company to understand customer churn through customer relationship management (CRM). Therefore, CRM analyzers are required to predict which customers will churn. This study proposes a customer-churn prediction system that uses an ensemble-learning technique consisting of stacking models and soft voting. Xgboost, Logistic regression, Decision tree, and Naïve Bayes machine-learning algorithms are selected to build a stacking model with two levels, and the three outputs of the second level are used for soft voting. Feature construction of the churn dataset includes equidistant grouping of customer behavior features to expand the space of features and discover latent information from the churn dataset. The original and new churn datasets are analyzed in the stacking ensemble model with four evaluation metrics. The experimental results show that the proposed customer churn predictions have accuracies of 96.12% and 98.09% for the original and new churn datasets, respectively. These results are better than state-of-the-art churn recognition systems.

The Race for Online Reputation: Implications for Platforms, Firms, and Consumers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingwen Yang ◽  
Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng ◽  
Vijay Mookerjee
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Event ◽  
Marketing Mix ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Online Reputation ◽  
Better Than

Online reputation has become a key marketing-mix variable in the digital economy. Our study helps managers decide on the effort they should use to manage online reputation. We consider an online reputation race in which it is important not just to manage the absolute reputation, but also the relative rating. That is, to stay ahead, a firm should try to have ratings that are better than those of its competitors. Our findings are particularly significant for platform owners (such as Expedia or Yelp) to strategically grow their base of participating firms: growing the middle of the market (firms with average ratings) is the best option considering the goals of the platform and the other stakeholders, namely incumbents and consumers. For firms, we find that they should increase their effort when the mean market rating increases. Another key insight for firms is that, sometimes, adversity can come disguised as an opportunity. When an adverse event strikes the industry (such as a reduction in sales margin or an increase in the cost of effort), a firm’s profit can increase if it can manage this event better than its competitors.

scholarly journals Day-Ahead Forecasting of Hourly Photovoltaic Power Based on Robust Multilayer Perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4863 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Huang ◽  
Longpeng Cao ◽  
Nanxin Peng ◽  
Sijia Li ◽  
Jing Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Power Plants ◽  
Mean Squared Error ◽  
Absolute Error ◽  
Multilayer Perception ◽  
Squared Error ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Effectiveness And Efficiency ◽  
Mlp Network ◽  
Grid Operation ◽  
Better Than

Photovoltaic (PV) modules convert renewable and sustainable solar energy into electricity. However, the uncertainty of PV power production brings challenges for the grid operation. To facilitate the management and scheduling of PV power plants, forecasting is an essential technique. In this paper, a robust multilayer perception (MLP) neural network was developed for day-ahead forecasting of hourly PV power. A generic MLP is usually trained by minimizing the mean squared loss. The mean squared error is sensitive to a few particularly large errors that can lead to a poor estimator. To tackle the problem, the pseudo-Huber loss function, which combines the best properties of squared loss and absolute loss, was adopted in this paper. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method was verified by benchmarking against a generic MLP network with real PV data. Numerical experiments illustrated that the proposed method performed better than the generic MLP network in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE).

scholarly journals Knowledge Sharing Strategy and Emission Reduction Benefits of Low Carbon Technology Collaborative Innovation in the Green Supply Chain

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fuqiang Wang ◽  
Huimin Li ◽  
Yongchao Cao ◽  
Chengyi Zhang ◽  
Yunlong Ran
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Knowledge Sharing ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Emission Reduction ◽  
Simulation Analysis ◽  
Green Supply Chain ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Knowledge Stock ◽  
Effort Level ◽  
The Cost

Knowledge sharing (KS) in the green supply chain (GSC) is jointly determined by the KS efforts of suppliers and manufacturers. This study uses the differential game method to explore the dynamic strategy of KS and the benefits of emission reduction in the process of low carbon (LC) technology in the GSC. The optimal trajectory of the knowledge stock and emission reduction benefits of suppliers and manufacturers under different strategies are obtained. The validity of the model and the results are verified by numerical simulation analysis, and the sensitivity analysis of the main parameters in the case of collaborative sharing is carried out. The results show that in the case of centralized decision-making, the KS efforts of suppliers and manufacturers are the highest, and the knowledge stock and emission reduction benefits of GSC are also the best. The cost-sharing mechanism can realize the Pareto improvement of GSC’s knowledge stock and emission reduction benefits, but the cost-sharing mechanism can only increase the supplier’s KS effort level. In addition, this study found that the price of carbon trading and the rate of knowledge decay have a significant impact on KS. The study provides a theoretical basis for promoting KS in the GSC and LC technology innovation.

scholarly journals A Building-Material Supply Chain Sustainable Operations under Fairness Concerns and Reference Price Benefits

Complexity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Huimin Xiao ◽  
Youlei Xu ◽  
Shiwei Li
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Building Material ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Reference Price ◽  
Dynamic Models ◽  
Stackelberg Game ◽  
Noncooperative Game ◽  
Sustainable Operations ◽  
Effort Level ◽  
Fairness Concerns

This paper incorporates fairness concerns and consumer reference price effects into a two-echelon building-material closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer. By establishing four differential game models, we investigate the sustainable operations and cooperation of this supply chain. The four game models are a Nash noncooperative game, Stackelberg game with cost sharing, Stackelberg game with fairness concerns and cost sharing, and centralized decision model. By using dynamic models and optimal control theory, we obtain the two members’ optimal equilibrium strategies in the supply chain. Analytical results show that the consumer reference price effect has a positive impact on the manufacturer’s effort level, retailer’s publicity level, and product brand goodwill, which can improve the supply chain performance. The retailer’s partial commitment to cost sharing can enhance the production enthusiasm of the manufacturer, improve the brand reputation of the product, and enhance the two members’ individual profitability. The distributional fairness concerns of the manufacturer not only prevent the manufacturer and retailer from achieving Pareto improvement but also lead to the decline of the manufacturer’s effort level and profitability. The research conclusions of this paper can provide some insights into the cooperation and sustainable development of the supply chain.

scholarly journals Economic Models of Higher Education: An International Perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre-Bruno Ruffini
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
Economic Models ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Tuition Fees ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Cost

As other sectors, higher education can be characterized by the combination of market mechanisms and state intervention in its funding and organization. Although higher education systems of developed countries pursue similar goals (provide high-level manpower, meet individual and social demands, etc.) and face similar challenges (massive expansion, internationalization, MOOCs, etc.) their economic models differ significantly. In some countries, universities are public and charge no or very low tuition fees, whereas in other countries, the cost-sharing with parents and students is much more demanding. The paper will try to underscore and explain these differences by drawing on the lessons of economic analysis and on the historical and cultural background of countries.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document