In the literature on supply chain management (SCM), the multi-echelon stochastic inventory models with known demand distributions have played a fundamental role for developing firms’ collaborative strategies, including the optimal policy to maximize efficiency of the centralized supply chain...

Chinese universities in recent decades have experienced a wave of surging patenting activities. Is the increase in patenting activities evidence that Chinese universities have been catching up with their counterparts outside of China, or are there low-quality “patent bubbles” with the surge?...

It is shown that the Fokker-Planck equations with linear drift γx and nonlinear drift γx + δx, i.e. the Rayleigh process, have exact symmetries on their own solution manifolds, the sl(2, R) ⊗ Weyl algebra and the sl(2, R) ⊗ I, respectively. The symmetries of these two types of processes...