Strategy

A model for the systematic evaluation and management of a company's technological resources is proposed as a first step to developing an integrated corporate marketing-technology strategy. The proposed framework raises 4 issues: 1. technology identification, 2. technology additions, 3. technological commercialization, and 4. treatment of individual technologies as interdependent elements making up an integrated, coherent plan. The technological decision nexus involves decisions related to the firm's development and commercialization of its technology.

An analysis of the environments of leading manufacturing firms operating in the United States and in Australia produced a series of hypothesized differences in the strategies, organization structures, and market environments of firms in the two countries. Parallel hypotheses about differences between domestic Australian firms and subsidiaries of foreign multinationals operating in Australia were also developed. The hypotheses were by and large supported when tested on data obtained from leading corporations in the two countries.

A nonstationary Markov chain is weakly ergodic if the dependence on the state distribution on the starting state vanishes as time tends to infinity. A chain is strongly ergodic if it is weakly ergodic and converges in distribution. In this paper we show that the two ergodicity concepts are equivalent for finite chains under rather general (and widely verifiable) conditions. We discuss applications to probabalistic analyses of general search methods for combinatorial optimization problems (simulated annealing).

Evidence of excess volatilities of asset prices compared with those of market fundamentals is often attributed to speculative bubbles. This study demonstrates that bubbles could in theory lead to excess volatility, but it shows that certain variance bounds tests preclude bubbles as an explanation. The evidence ought to be attributed to model misspecification or inappropriate statistical tests. One important misspecification occurs if a researcher incorrectly specifies the time series properties of market fundamentals.

Most quantities of interest in discounted and undiscounted (semi-) Markov decision processes can be obtained by solving a system of functional equations. This paper derives bounds and variational characterizations for the solutions of such systems.

This paper considers a single-item, periodic-review inventory model with uncertain demands. In contrast to prior treatments of this problem we assume a finite production capacity per period. Assuming stationary data, a convex one-period cost function and a discrete demand distribution, we show (under a few additional unrestrictive assumptions) that a modified base-stock policy is optimal under the average-cost criterion; in addition, we characterize the optimal base-stock level.

This paper considers a single-item, periodic review inventory model with uncertain demands. We assume a finite production capacity in each period. With stationary data, a convex one-period cost function and a continuous demand distribution, we show (under a few additional unrestrictive assumptions) that a modified basic-stock policy is optimal under the discounted cost criterion, both for finite and infinite planning horizons. In addition we characterize the optimal base-stock levels in several ways.

We consider the problem of scheduling n jobs, each with a specific processing requirement, release time and due date on m uniform parallel machines. It is shown that a feasible schedule can be obtained by determining the maximum flow in a network, thus permitting the use of standard network flow codes. Using a specialized maximum flow procedure, the complexity reduces to O(tn3) operations when t is the number of distinct machine types.