This case introduces students to GM’s partnership with Toyota in the NUMMI joint venture in order to analyze the challenges GM might face in implementing this approach more broadly. Students consider the evolution of lean operations and its various elements. The case focuses on the Toyota Production System, its benefits and related flexibility. What are the potential implications of the analysis for GM’s production strategy and profitability?
We propose a message-passing paradigm for resource allocation problems. This serves to connect ideas from the message-passing literature, which has primarily grown out of the communications, statistical physics, and artificial intelligence communities, with a problem central to operations research. This also provides a new framework for decentralized management that generalizes price-based systems by allowing incentives to vary across activities and consumption levels.
In this paper we study the determinants of business groups’ ownership structure using unique panel data on Korean chaebols. In particular, we attempt to understand how groups form over time. We find that chaebols grow vertically (that is, pyramidally) as the family uses well-established group firms (“central firms”) to set up and acquire firms that have low pledgeable income (e.g., low profitability) and high acquisition premia.
Using the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all the branches. Several different empirical tests consistently point to the existence of a systematic branch-specific component to employee attitudes.
What do economics and history have to tell us about the ways euro zone countries are likely to resolve their problems of fiscal unsustainability and banking system insolvency? In answering that question, I am among the most pessimistic observers of the likely future of the euro and its membership. In my view, the euro zone's likely failure to avoid at least some departures, if not total collapse, reflects its poor initial institutional design.