Quality Improvement Incentive Strategy in Agricultural Products Supply Chain under Social Preference

This paper sets Stackelberg model of bilateral quality efforts decision dominated by supermarket in the agricultural products supply chain by considering fairness concern and altruistic reciprocity. We use backward induction method to compute and prove that A3P’ fairness concern can play the role of profit distribution mechanism in agricultural products supply chain, and has no effect on the bilateral quality efforts decision, total profit of supply chain and objective efficiency, but can improve both the subjective and objective fairness degree. Meanwhile, supermarket’s altruistic reciprocity can improve the total quality efforts and total profit of supply chain, optimize the objective efficiency and subjective fairness of supply chain.

Designing two-period decentralized service chain incentives with the consideration of customer acquisition and retention

PurposeThe authors address a two-dimensional (both customer acquisition and retention) incentive in a decentralized service chain consisting of a risk-neutral brand and agent (or averse). Design/methodology/approachThe authors focus on the relationship between acquisition and retention, that is, retained customers (repeated purchases) are based on and come from the acquired (new) customers in the former period. The authors also design a two-period separate incentive on both dimensions.FindingsThe authors found that a targeted incentive strategy should be applied for achieving more revenue when the incentive intensities are relatively small. Otherwise, the brand needs to adjust the targeted incentive strategy into incentivizing the opposite dimension, particularly on acquisition. Under the optimal contract, the brand needs to be very careful with deciding the fixed part of the incentive salary and the incentive intensities on both dimensions. For example, the fixed salary initially decreases and then increases in the incentive intensities. For the optimal incentive policies, the brand should incentivize acquisition but outsource retention if the agent is risk-neutral. When the agent is becoming risk-averse, the brand should lower its incentive intensity as the risk degree and variances become larger. Interestingly, the brand may benefit from introducing risks.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by considering the following points. First, the authors extend the principal-agent incentive model by considering two-period decisions of customer acquisition and retention. Second, based on the two-period principal-agent problem, the authors design separate incentive intensities on acquisition and retention, respectively. While, most of the literature focused on acquisition incentives. Third, different from other works focusing on either risk-neutral or risk-averse environments, the authors consider both and compare the cases of risk-neutral and risk-averse to analyze the impact of risk on the optimal decisions and the brand's expected profit.

The Principle-Agent Conflict Problem in a Continuous-Time Delegated Asset Management Model

This paper considers the principle-agent conflict problem in a continuous-time delegated asset management model when the investor and the fund manager are all risk-averse with risk sensitivity coefficients γ f and γ m , respectively. Suppose that the investor entrusts his money to the fund manager. The return of the investment is determined by the manager’s effort level and incentive strategy, but the benefit belongs to the investor. In order to encourage the manager to work hard, the investor will determine the manager’s salary according to the terminal income. This is a stochastic differential game problem, and the distribution of income between the manager and the investor is a key point to be solved in the custody model. The uncertain form of the incentive strategy implies that the problem is different from the classical stochastic optimal control problem. In this paper, we first express the investor’s incentive strategy in term of two auxiliary processes and turn this problem into a classical one. Then, we employ the dynamic programming principle to solve the problem.

Challenge Accepted! a Critical Reflection on How to Perform a Health Survey Among University Students—An Example of the Healthy Campus Mainz Project

Background: Universities represent an important setting of everyday life for health promotion. The Healthy Campus Mainz project aims to develop an evidence-based and comprehensive student health management program covering physical, mental, and social health promotion. Hence, an initial health survey was performed in order to identify the students' health concerns and resources. Up until now, it remains unclear which topics to choose in a health survey among university students and which strategies can be recommended to receive an acceptable response rate or representative student sample within a university setting. The present paper contributes to the call for the present research topic “Public Health Promotion in University Students” by describing methods for health assessment. Therefore, the current paper aims to give an empirical example on how to perform a health survey among university students, focusing on (1) choosing topics for the survey and (2) methodological considerations of how to reach the target population.Methods: An online questionnaire including around 270 items was developed covering a comprehensive set of health topics. Participants were recruited via the university email. Mixed channels for survey promotion, such as lecture visits and social media, were used, accompanied by different monetary and non-monetary incentives. Descriptive analyses were performed to describe the sample.Results: A total of 5,006 participants (out of 31,213 registered students) viewed the first page of the questionnaire; of whom, 4,714 continued further. After a manual data cleaning according to the predefined criteria, the final sample was 4,351, demonstrating a response rate of 13.9%. Students from different study disciplines participated. However, some study disciplines showed a low participation rate, hence, making the results not free from some bias.Discussion: This survey is exceptional as it integrates a great variety of health aspects. The incentive strategy demonstrated promising results. Future research should try to improve target-group-specific recruitment strategies for the traditionally underrepresented groups, such as males and specific study disciplines. This would not only include advancing marketing strategies, but also refining the incentive strategy.

Heritage incentives programs in the province of Ontario: developing a standardized evaluation strategy

Financial incentives and property tax rebates are common approaches used to encourage the preservation and rehabilitation of heritage properties. The use of these techniques is employed across a number of Ontario municipalities. The purpose of this paper is to develop an evaluative strategy that can be used to better understand the process and improve the function of these programs. Through the review of a number of programs and relevant sources, a model was developed to allow for program organizers to evaluate and improve their heritage incentive strategies. This model incorporates both quantifiable indicators to assess program performance and opportunities for participants to express their opinions on the program process. The implementation of this program in local municipalities could provide the opportunity to make evidence based recommendations to improve the overall function of the heritage incentive strategy.

Heritage incentives programs in the province of Ontario: developing a standardized evaluation strategy

Financial incentives and property tax rebates are common approaches used to encourage the preservation and rehabilitation of heritage properties. The use of these techniques is employed across a number of Ontario municipalities. The purpose of this paper is to develop an evaluative strategy that can be used to better understand the process and improve the function of these programs. Through the review of a number of programs and relevant sources, a model was developed to allow for program organizers to evaluate and improve their heritage incentive strategies. This model incorporates both quantifiable indicators to assess program performance and opportunities for participants to express their opinions on the program process. The implementation of this program in local municipalities could provide the opportunity to make evidence based recommendations to improve the overall function of the heritage incentive strategy.

A New User-Based Incentive Strategy for Improving Bike Sharing Systems’ Performance

The benefits of having a Bike Sharing System (BSS) in a city are numerous. Among other advantages, it promotes a cleaner environment with less traffic and pollution. One major problem the users of such services encounter is that of full or empty stations, causing user dissatisfaction. The objective of this work is to propose a new user-based incentive method to enhance BSS performance. The proposed method relies on a spatial outlier detection algorithm. It consists of adapting the departure and arrival stations of the users to the BSS state by stimulating the users to change their journeys in view of minimizing the number of full and empty stations. Experiments are carried out to compare our proposed method to some existing methods for enhancing the resource availability of BSSs, and they are performed on a real dataset issued from a well-known BSS called Velib. The results show that the proposed strategy improves the availability of BSS resources, even when the collaboration of users is partial.