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The continuing increase of the popularity of mobile phones generates a large volume of waste mobile phones. The efficient collection of this waste has become a focus and frontier of both academic research and related business. This paper reviews the waste mobile phone collection in Dalian, China. The findings show that several challenges currently impede the implementation of collection, including unsmooth collection channels, poor convenience, and low environmental awareness of residents. A new joint collection mode is put forward to increase the waste mobile phone collection rate. In the mode, the responsibilities of each stakeholder (including the collecting enterprise, the third-party logistics company, the government, and the resident) are clarified. Moreover, a conjoint analysis method is applied to identify residents' willingness for collection. The obtained results show that compensation mode, collection price, and convenience degree are the three factors that influence the prevailing preferences of residents. Collection services with high market share must satisfy the concourse of three conditions. The collection price exceeds 30% of the mobile phone's original price, the compensation mode is cash and information service is provided. These results can provide a reference for the service design of collection mode and the formulation of relevant corporate strategies. • Waste mobile phones are an environmental problem if not handled appropriately. • Collection is the critical bottleneck of waste mobile phones managements. • A new joint collection mode aiming at increasing collection rate was put forward. • Conjoint analysis was applied to investigate residents' willingness for collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When participants in introductory business courses encounter the term "operations strategy," it is not easy for them to appreciate what operations strategy is about, or how it fits with overall business strategy. This game breaks down highfalutin jargon into experiences that participants can readily relate to. While working in teams to make paper boats, and competing with other teams, participants realize that they have intuitively engaged in the formulation and implementation of their team's operations strategy. They begin to appreciate the interplay between the customer's requirements, their own team's strengths, the "competitive priorities" that their team must emphasize, and the tradeoffs inherent in making these decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid growth of online grocery shopping in South Korea, e-grocery retailers have faced intense competition. Consequently, they attempt to differentiate themselves by offering diversified delivery services, such as providing early morning delivery services or eco-friendly packaging. The purpose of this paper is to analyze consumer preferences with regards to delivery services with different delivery times and packaging types targeting South Korea's online grocery markets. Specifically, six delivery types consisting of combinations of two delivery time options (dawn, daytime) and three packaging types (paper box, market cooler bag, personal icebox) are examined. A survey was conducted in July 2020 with 218 consumers who regularly buy fresh food online. The collected data were analyzed by means of a conjoint analysis and ANOVA. The present study finds that customers most strongly prefer dawn delivery using a personal icebox, followed by dawn delivery using a market cooler bag, with daytime delivery using a paper box being the least preferable. Furthermore, consumers value the packaging type more than the delivery time when selecting a delivery service. Lastly, the preferences of consumers regarding delivery service types differ according to their characteristics. This study is expected to contribute to the establishment of a delivery strategy for online grocery companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the presented paper, we investigate efficient solutions to optimization problems with multiple criteria and bounded trade-offs. A nonlinear optimization problem to find the relationships between the upper bound for trade-offs and objective functions is presented. Due to this problem, we determine some properly efficient points that are closer to the ideal point. To this end, we apply the extended form of the generalized Tchebycheff norm. Note that all the presented results work for general problems and no convexity assumption is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research background: A rapidly developing e-commerce market and growing customer expectations regarding the speed and frequency of deliveries have made the last mile of the supply chain more challenging. The expectations of e-customers increase every year. They choose those companies that deliver goods faster and cheaper than others. A significant group of customers in Poland still selects home delivery. Many of them frequently return products to the retailer. These expectations and behaviour pose a challenge for the transport companies to deliver parcels to individual customers soon after the purchase, sometimes even on the same day. In addition, in creasingly frequent deliveries contribute to environmental pollution, congestion, and accidents, as well as more expensive deliveries. Purpose of the article: The paper aims to identify e-customers' preferences and assess their impact on sustainable last-mile delivery (LMD) in the e-commerce market. The authors have also identified factors influencing e-customers' behaviour to make last-mile delivery more sustainable. Methods: The conjoint analysis was applied to evaluate a set of profiles defined by selected attributes in order to investigate the overall preferences for the profiles created by the respondents to the survey. Findings & value added: The segmentation of e-customers according to their preferences connected with last-mile delivery was presented. The added value of the paper is the presentation of the methodology to assess the impact of customer preferences on sustainable last-mile delivery. The obtained results may contribute to the formulation of recommendations for e-commerce and logistics companies regarding the preferences of e-customers to improve the sustainability of lastmile delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product bundling is receiving increasing attention in sustainable agricultural development as a means to ensure access to and enhance the uptake of, agricultural technologies by smallholders. Yet, the how and why of bundling for smallholders are not well-understood. The current paper, therefore, brings bundling theory from the marketing literature to the smallholder context. We use a conjoint experiment, a proven marketing technique for designing new products, services and bundles, to design agricultural input and service bundles for soybean-producing smallholders in rural Ethiopia. The empirical findings from 252 smallholders suggest that product bundling enhances smallholders’ preferences and hence intentions to adopt technologies but that bundles must be designed carefully following a smallholder-centric approach. Drawing on our findings and the literature, we delineate the different steps that need to be taken to develop bundles for the successful uptake of new technologies by smallholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the increasing need for safety and security in road freight transport, and to targeted legislation specifying the availability of freight drivers' rest areas, this paper proposes a plan and a model for deployment of safe and secure parking areas for truck drivers. Disaggregate analysis within a stated preference and conjoint analysis framework leads to the modelling of truck parking area selection by each truck driver that registers in the system proposed in this research. The concept builds upon the Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) upgrading of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) infrastructure systems while adapting to novel transport and logistics needs in an operationally safe, secure, and efficient environment for the supply chain. The analysis is applied in the Orient/East-Med Corridor of the TEN-T and is supported by the clustering of available truck parking areas for each truck route in the application subnetwork. The personalised approach is scalable and can be integrated into platforms for safe and secure truck parking areas, thus facilitating their acceptance and increasing awareness by the end-users. From pilot implementation on the Hellenic motorways, functional evaluation of use cases indicates 94.4% estimated choice probability of the most suitable parking area by the pilot drivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) in the decision making of humans and animals is a well-documented phenomenon, but its underlying neuronal mechanism remains unclear. Modeling approaches have conceptualized SAT through the threshold hypothesis as adjustments to the decision threshold. However, the leading neurophysiological view is the gain modulation hypothesis. This hypothesis postulates that the SAT mechanism is implemented through changes in the dynamics of the choice circuit, which increase the baseline firing rate and the speed of neuronal integration. In this paper, I investigated alternative computational mechanisms of SAT and showed that the threshold hypothesis was qualitatively consistent with the behavioral data, but the gain modulation hypothesis was not. In order to reconcile the threshold hypothesis with the neurophysiological evidence, I considered the interference of alpha oscillations with the decision process and showed that alpha oscillations could increase the discriminatory power of the decision system, although they slowed down the decision process. This suggests that the magnitude of alpha waves suppression during the event related desynchronization (ERD) of alpha oscillations depends on a SAT condition and the amplitude of alpha oscillations is lower in the speed condition. I also showed that the lower amplitude of alpha oscillations resulted in an increase in the baseline firing rate and the speed of neuronal intergration. Thus, the interference of the event related desynchronization of alpha oscillations with a SAT condition explains why an increase in the baseline firing rate and the speed of neuronal integration accompany the speed condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses recently developed robust estimation methods to empirically reassess the long-standing inflation-unemployment trade-off debate. Indeed, we study to what extent unemployment-based New Keynesian Phillips Curves are informative about the relationship between inflation dynamics and labor market conditions. In particular, we attempt to quantify the 'elasticities' of inflation with respect to unemployment in two economies, the US and the Euro Area, whose labor market characteristics are admittedly very different. We find that the relevance of the inflation-unemployment trade-off and its empirical adequacy is greatly enhanced once the informational content of key labor market variables is explored in our estimations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing, important question in the operations strategy literature pertains to tradeoffs: Can manufacturers focus on multiple priorities simultaneously or achieve strength on multiple capabilities without sacrificing performance of another? In this paper, we accumulate, integrate, and examine the wide spectrum of conclusions reached in the literature concerning tradeoffs using modified meta-analysis methods. Based on two decades of empirical research in operations strategy, we find that the evidence in the literature indicates manufacturers, on average, do not report experiencing tradeoffs among the competitive dimensions of quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost as suggested by the classical tradeoffs model. Our meta-analysis also reveals that the way variables are operationalized, whether initiatives are implemented, and the unit of analysis are all related to the degree and nature of the evidence a paper contains with respect to the tradeoffs issue. We interpret our meta-analysis results in the context of the prevailing model of manufacturing strategy and the theory of performance frontiers. We also discuss how the research designs used in this literature, which are predominantly cross-sectional, affect the nature of the evidence generated and the conclusions that can be drawn. We go on to suggest research designs that more directly assess the tradeoffs issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding customers' decision and behavior is the crux of marketing. Despite the broad applications of weighted sum approaches, like conjoint analysis, sophisticated methodological approaches are under-researched in this field. Conversely, multi-criteria decision making's (MCDM) objective is to focus on and forecast these decisions. Based on the Choquet integral, this paper presents an effective and precise calculation method to understand real customers' decision making and to overcome the weighted sum method's limitations. We compare the weighted sum approach with stable and instable Choquet integral methods in three experimental studies. Our results indicate that the weighted sum approach is valuable in pure order-related applications. In quantitative comparisons, both the stable and instable Choquet integral approaches match the decision makers' preferences more closely than the weighted sum approach. The paper demonstrates that well-developed traditional approaches have their merits and can still be applied in the right context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-objective optimization of power converters is a time-consuming task, especially when multiple operating points and multiple converter topologies must be considered. As a result, various steps are often taken to simplify the design problem and restrict the size of the design space prior to going through an optimization procedure. While this saves time, it produces potentially sub-optimal designs, and existing approaches must tradeoff between running time and design optimality. This paper presents an optimization-oriented method for modeling power converters and their components as posynomial functions, allowing multi-objective optimization of converters to be formulated as a geometric program, a type of convex optimization problem. This allows the use of fast, powerful solvers that guarantee global optimality of solutions. The method is demonstrated using the example of low-power multi-level flying capacitor step-down converters. Results show that, using geometric programming, sets of globally Pareto-optimal designs of two-, three-, and four-level converters with respect to efficiency and power density, for one design space and one operating point, can be generated in as little as 25 s, on a mid- to upper range laptop computer. Thus, optimal designs for three different converter topologies for hundreds of different operating points and/or design spaces can be generated in several hours—less than the time required to globally optimize one converter topology at one operating point for one design space using currently prevalent methods. This paper also demonstrates how geometric programming can be used to quickly perform sensitivity and tradeoff analysis of optimal converter designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the fundamental tradeoff between storage and latency in a general wireless interference network with caches equipped at all transmitters and receivers. The tradeoff is characterized by an information-theoretic metric, normalized delivery time (NDT), which is the worst case delivery time of the actual traffic load at a transmission rate specified by degrees of freedom of a given channel. We obtain both an achievable upper bound and a theoretical lower bound of the minimum NDT for any number of transmitters, any number of receivers, and any feasible cache size tuple. We show that the achievable NDT is exactly optimal in certain cache size regions, and is within a bounded multiplicative gap to the theoretical lower bound in other regions. In the achievability analysis, we first propose a novel cooperative transmitter/receiver coded caching strategy. It offers the freedom to adjust file splitting ratios for NDT minimization. We then propose a delivery strategy that transforms the considered interference network into a new class of cooperative X-multicast channels. It leverages local caching gain, coded multicasting gain, and transmitter cooperation gain (via interference alignment and interference neutralization) opportunistically. Finally, the achievable NDT is obtained by solving a linear programming problem. This paper reveals that with caching at both transmitter and receiver sides, the network can benefit simultaneously from traffic load reduction and transmission rate enhancement, thereby effectively reducing the content delivery latency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How local economies can successfully develop remains an important issue for any developing country. One mechanism for promotion of economic development is government-driven policy. The problem is that it is not clear whether public-led economic promotion attracts consumers and which promotion factors are relatively significant for boosting particular goods. This paper examines attributes of green tea products likely influencing consumer preferences, focusing on the Thai Nguyen area in Vietnam as an example. In this area, the "One Commune, One Product" (OCOP) project has been implemented by the local government. This study employs randomized conjoint analysis based on data collected from 450 randomly selected consumers in several local supermarkets. Interestingly, the results show that online style sales have a negative preference for the purchase of green tea products, while transparency, such as the traceability of the product and product information, and reliability, such as certification, enhance the purchase of these products by consumers. However, this finding is not necessarily robust because our results indicate that approximately 90% of consumers tend to choose the default pair, which means that they do not actively prefer the product, possibly implying that this kind of public-led promotion is not yet broadly familiar to all people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]