During the last few decades, the growing demand of electronics and computer products has given rise to a new breed of manufacturing firms in Asia, the so-called original design manufacturers (ODMs), for example, Flextronics, Quanta, and Compal, etc. These companies provide design, manufacturing,...

Firms in advanced economies are increasingly outsourcing software and technology development as well as other knowledge work to a worldwide supply base. Standard economic and learning models predict that focal firms should outsource either all or none of a particular activity unless extra...

We analyze contracting behaviors in a two-tier supply chain system consisting of competing manufacturers and competing retailers. We contrast the contracting outcome of a Stackelberg game, in which the manufacturers offer take-it-or-leave-it contracts to the retailers, with that of a bargaining...

We analyze a model that integrates demand shaping via dynamic pricing and risk mitigation via supply diversification. The firm under consideration replenishes a certain product from a set of capacitated suppliers for a price-dependent demand in each period. Under deterministic capacities, we...

The urgent demand for high-energy and high-power energy storage devices initiates considerable interest for Li-O 2 batteries. Considering the catalytic reaction that happened on the cathode, the electrocatalyst plays a key role in deciding the performance of Li-O 2 batteries. Herein, a cobalt...

Conservation of the ecological environment presents scientists with a challenging dilemma because the strategy often leads to negative impacts on impoverished people in the area affected by the project. To consider this problem, we investigated the implications of China's national and regional...

We study an economy in which the rate of change of population depends on population policy decisions. This requires population as well as capital as state variables. By showing the algebraic relationship between the shadow price of the population and the shadow price of the per capita capital...

Here, we present a mathematical model for simulating both soil water flow and salt transport in two directions (perpendicular and parallel to the drip tubing) under mulched drip irrigation with saline water. We evaluated the effectiveness of this model by comparing the simulated values with...

In this paper, we consider a semi-on-line scheduling problem of two identical machines with common maintenance time interval and nonresumable availability. We prove a lower bound of 2.79129 on the competitive ratio and give an on-line algorithm with competitive ratio 2.79633 for this problem.