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For small-scale electronic commerce supply chains, designing effective strategies to improve operational effectiveness, market share and long-term survival are essential aspects. However, researchers have given less attention in addressing these issues. This study proposes a dynamic cost-sharing contract for an e-tailer supply chain to address the issues of asymmetric information, long-term integration, and ineffective costs. We include consistency constraints to obtain stable incentives over time and eliminate the need for re-negotiation. The findings emphasise that the dynamic contract significantly reduces the overall supply chain costs. The consistency constraints guarantee high incentives, thus assuring the players remain in the total contract period and enable long-term integration.Other Information Published in: Annals of Operations Research License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-022-04662-y

With the optimal operating cost and optimal carbon emission target of the chemical logistics companies, a low-carbon routing optimisation with a multi-energy type vehicle combined problem is proposed by considering the concept of the logistics companies’ low-carbon behaviour. An integrated decision-making of multi-energy type vehicles combined strategy and route optimisation based on customer demand is presented, and an improved genetic algorithm is designed. A case study is then applied based on the data collected from the case research. The effectiveness of the improved genetic algorithm is tested. The two joint objectives of operating cost and carbon emission are examined through the cost analysis of environmental energy vehicles and traditional energy vehicles in different combination scenarios. The case analysis shows that a rational multi-energy type vehicle combination with route optimisation has a significant correlation with the operating cost and carbon emissions, while the environmental vehicle purchasing cost reduction and subsidy policy affect the operating cost.

This paper develops a new cooperative dynamic time consistent model for studying regional air pollution management issues in a cooperative game framework for formulating pollution control policies and dynamically consistent compensation mechanisms. As air pollution is a transboundary issue, unilateral response on the part of one region is generally ineffective. Regional cooperation is essential to resolve serious environmental problems. In addition, the long-term environmental impacts are closely related to the building up existing air pollution stocks in Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Respirable suspended particulates (RSP) and Ozone (O3). A cooperative dynamic game with different types of pollutants is developed. We characterize the non-cooperative outcomes, and examine the cooperative arrangements, group optimal actions, and individually rational imputations. In particular, an air pollution levy consisting of four components involving damage charges on emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, respirable suspended particulates and ozone depletion materials. Cooperative games offer the possibility of socially optimal and group efficient solutions to the lack of cooperation among different regions involving decision problems among strategic actors. This paper makes a valuable contribution to the literature as this is the first cooperative dynamic time consistent model for regional management of different types of air pollutants.

By convention, performance measurement from the business perspective is executed using the accounting standard costing and variance analysis doctrine. However, this practice is hardly theoretical, as it does not measure performance per se; what it is measuring is simply the actual activities and their pre-determined standards. According to theory and good practice, performance measurement is concerned with how strategy is translated into work via the different organizational structures and initiatives down to operations, using appropriate methods and procedures, and typically, the steps consist of specifying of objectives (goals), cascading them down the hierarchy, using standards in measuring progress (or deviation from goals), and rewarding performance. That is, strategy translation is a practical endeavor just like any OM activities. Since it is apparent that there is no conceptually established standard on performance measurement from the business perspective, we develop a performance measurement standard system (PMStd) based on the well-tested Classical Test Theory (CTT) as used by many non-business practitioners. Using a case study methodology, the PMStd is implemented in an emerging Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, and the results suggest that vital performance information on operations can be pinpointed and analyzed for actions to be taken to remedy weaknesses in order to improve performance.

This paper considers the Flexible Job-shop Scheduling Problem with Operation and Processing flexibility (FJSP-OP) with the objective of minimizing the makespan. A Genetic Algorithm based approach is presented to solve the FJSP-OP. For the performance improvement, a new and concise Four-Tuple Scheme (FTS) is proposed for modeling a job with operation and processing flexibility. Then, with the FTS, an enhanced Genetic Algorithm employing a more efficient encoding strategy is developed. The use of this encoding strategy ensures that the classic genetic operators can be adopted to the utmost extent without generating infeasible offspring. Experiments have validated the proposed approach, and the results have shown the effectiveness and high performance of the proposed approach.

This paper studies the coordination problem of a three-echelon supply chain system consisting of one supplier, third-party logistics service providers (TPLSP) and one retailer that provides seasonal fresh agricultural products to customers. The market demand for the retailer is assumed to be influenced by the retail price, the product's freshness and other random variables. Both quantity and quality losses are viewed as endogenous variables of the freshness-keeping effort, which is decided by the TPLSP. Dynamic game models for both the decentralized decision mode and the centralized decision mode are developed, and asymmetric demand information is considered in the decentralized decision mode. The analysis shows that decentralized decision making could result in the distortion of the order quantity and selling price and could ultimately result in a loss of supply chain profit. The TPLSP is motivated to exaggerate the demand, which could seriously damage the supplier's interests. Based on an analysis of the major influencing factors in the supply chain system, a coordination contract based on cost and revenue sharing (RS) is designed for the two transaction processes in the three-echelon supply chain system. We illustrate the proposed models with a numerical study and conduct a sensitivity analysis of some of the key parameters in the models. It is proven that with the designed contract, the sales volume can be significantly expanded, all the supply chain members can benefit from Pareto improvement, and both the retailer and the TPLSP have no incentive to exaggerate the market demand.

These days companies are competing in a fast changing environment. To keep its competitiveness, the company needs not only to seek and select new investment opportunities but also to adjust its existing projects. This paper discusses an optimal project selection and adjusting problem under capital and land resource limitations. Due to the complex and dynamic nature of the economic environment, the project parameters such as initial outlays, upgrade expenditures and net cash flows are treated as random variables. Net present value method is employed to calculate the investment return, and a mean–variance optimal adjustment and selection model is developed. To solve the proposed optimization problem with big number decision variables, a cellular binary particle swarm optimization which hybridizes cellular automation and particle swarm optimization is proposed. As an illustration of the proposed algorithm, a numerical example is also presented.

Both mathematical characteristics and computational aspects of dynamic optimization in finance have potential for extensions. Various proposed extensions are presented in this paper for dynamic optimization modelling in finance, adapted from developments in other areas of economics and mathematics. They show the need and potential for further areas of study and extensions in financial modelling. The extensions discussed and made concern (a) incorporation of the elements of a dynamic optimization model, (b) an improved model including physical capital, (c) some computational experiments. These extensions make dynamic financial optimisation relatively more organized, coherent and coordinated. These extensions are relevant for applications of financial models to academic and practical exercises. This paper reports initial efforts in providing some useful extensions; further work is necessary to complete the research agenda.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the role of corporate governance instruments in affecting the value of a firm (CGVF) in isolation and in combination of each other in a developing financial market characterized by the existence of additional imperfections in this market.Design/methodology/approach – Multiple regression analysis is performed on the data which are collected by using stratified random sampling technique for the companies listed in the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange for the years 2000‐2003.Findings – The results for the study suggest that majority shareholders expropriate minority shareholders in this market. On the contrary, a bigger board, market liquidity, efficient utilization of assets and informational efficiency in the financial system have a value adding impact on the firms' performance. The results on the role of corporate governance instruments (board size and CEO duality) in affecting the value of a firm in combination with each other suggest that the additional imperfec...

Modigliani and Miller's argument of the irrelevance of the debt-equity ratio to the value of the firm implies that capital structure has no impact on the value of the firm (irrelevance result). In the existing work, the proof or disproof of the Modigliani and Miller theorem is based critically on some specific assumptions, not general enough to be always valid in practical finance, and including especially a constant interest rate for borrowing. This paper develops another optimal financing model, whose assumptions differ from those in previous models for the Modigliani and Miller theorem. If the borrowing rate increases with the amount borrowed, there is a unique optimal ratio of debt to equity, determining the optimal capital structure. Therefore the debt-equity ratio does affect the value of the firm, and hence the need for good corporate financial management to maximize the value of the firm, by choosing the optimal debt. Some important issues of sensitivity are also analysed. The proposed model should apply to more real situations, and therefore makes an original contribution to finance.

The world has recently moved to a new economic growth path, driven by the rapid growth of developing country economies. How this new path affects the vulnerability of key biophysical systems and its resulting policy implications are assessed using a risk-based approach. Greenhouse gas emissions based on current policies are projected to 2030, with aggressive reductions from 2030 to 2100. Probabilities for global mean temperature in 2100 are applied to damage functions for four key vulnerabilities. Five conclusions are reached. CO2 emissions grow by 3.1% per annum over 2004–2030. Atmospheric CO2 concentration levels 4900ppm CO2-e and warming of 2.2–4.7 1C are attained by 2100. The four key vulnerabilities face a very high risk of adverse outcomes. The current policy mix cannot adequately manage these risks, which can be reduced but not eliminated by early global action. Furthermore, the Intergovernmental on Panel Change’s (IPCC) Special Report for Emission Scenarios (SRES) no longer provide a reliable tool for medium-term analysis in the new economy. Measures to reduce global fossil fuel consumption, accelerate the diffusion of existing non-fossil fuel technologies and to hasten the development of new technologies are urgently needed.

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to assess the relative efficiency of 12 selected Asia Pacific countries in their development of knowledge‐based economies (KEs).Design/methodology/approachThe performances of the selected countries are evaluated using data envelopment analysis (DEA).FindingsThe DEA scores indicate that four of the emerging countries (India, Indonesia, Thailand and Mainland China) are relatively inefficient in K‐E development compared to the other eight which are equally efficient. The main reason for their backwardness is due to the outflow of their human capital resource to the developed countries. This seriously undermines the level of their K‐E development compared to their counterparts. The results also indicate that knowledge dissemination is generally not a serious problem, except for India.Research limitations/implicationsThe results and the discussion should be taken as the first step in an analysis which warrants further research. The knowledge clusters identified earlier could suggest that thek‐economy may be better studied by its components where the more diagnostic versions of the DEA model can be applied.Practical implicationsThe importance of this study however, is not so much the immediate result which highlights comparative efficiencies, but rather that DEA is a workable model which can take the study of KE further in investigating the contributory factors of KE.Originality/valueThis paper makes an original contribution because a comprehensive analysis of this type, of relative performance measures of the knowledge economy in the Asia Pacific countries, has not been done before using the quantitative technique of DEA.

Understanding of factors like economic fundamentals or bubbles that normally determine the returns of stock in any emerging market such as the Thai stock market is essential for academic, investment planning and public policy reasons. An empirical study of the existence of rational speculative bubbles in the Thai stock market is undertaken by using the Weibull Hazard model. The conventional Weibull Hazard model is used as a benchmark model for other speculative bubble models. Empirical results suggest the presence of rational speculative bubbles in the Thai stock market, especially during the pre-crisis period. While rational speculative bubbles were not present immediately after the post-crisis period, some were observed a few years after the crisis. A possible explanation for such a result concerning rational speculative behaviour and bubbles in the emerging stock markets could be attributed to the presence of market imperfections in emerging stock markets, requiring institutional and policy developments to ensure efficient operation of the stock market.

A new approach to well-being measurement is presented in this paper based on multidimensional hierarchical human needs and motivation. This paper empirically applies this new measure of well-being to Australia for the period 1985–2000. This hierarchical approach is underpinned by a rigorous psychological theory of human motivation. Hierarchical human needs are classified into five categories. Eight indicators have been chosen to reflect these categories. A composite indicator of these eight indicators is calculated. This paper concludes that it is necessary to consider multidimensional human needs and motivation when analysing and seeking to improve well-being through economic and social development activities.

A dominant objective within the public policies of all SE Asian countries has been the achievement of economic growth. The issue of sustainability has serious implications for this policy objective. Pursuit of economic growth is concerned solely with the present, whilst sustainability is concerned with ensuring the current generation meets its present needs without threatening future generations' ability to do likewise. National accounts, such as gross domestic product, can measure healthy economies, but they can not measure sustainability. This paper, however, sets out a conceptual approach that describes the misalignment of national accounting measures with sustainability objectives and provides empirical evidence of how this misalignment can be partially overcome. An empirical approach is developed whereby certain adjustments to national accounts, based on normative social choice theory, are introduced to indicate how a partial measure of sustainability can be determined using national accounting aggregates as a base.

Thailand has achieved remarkable levels of economic growth over the last three decades. This sustained economic growth has played a major role in reducing absolute poverty levels from nearly one third of the population in 1975 to presently less than 10%, thus increasing the welfare of many Thais. This performance ranks Thailand as one of the world's most successful economies during this period. However, an increasing number of studies have begun to find that at a certain point achieving economic growth stops improving welfare and actually begins to diminish it due to the hidden and traditionally unreported costs of associated with this growth. With one exception, these new studies have focussed on high-income countries. This study will estimate an index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW) for a developing country, Thailand, over a 25-year period, 1975–1999. This paper concludes that even low–middle income countries are beginning to approach the point in which economic growth produces both diminishing and, at times, negative welfare returns as the costs of achieving economic growth begin to outweigh the benefits. These results are important for policy makers and highlight the importance of implementing alternative welfare enhancing interventions that must be considered in place of simply achieving economic growth. The emphasis of this paper is not on the methodology of estimating the ISEW for Thailand, but rather on the policy implications for developing countries of diminishing and negative welfare returns brought about through the achievement of economic growth.

The importance of good health of a population is crucial when determining social welfare. A new health-adjusted national income indicator that explores the relationships between economic growth, health and social welfare in Bangkok, Thailand from 1975 to 1999 is applied. This new approach to social welfare analysis is based on normative social choice theory, cost-benefit and systems analysis and is called (new)3welfare economics. This paper argues that traditional measures of welfare, such as national income, fail to reflect accurately the impact of health on social welfare.

There are many applications in economics of nonlinear programming, usually under convexity assumptions. Some nonconvex models have also been discussed extensively in order to relax the restrictive assumption of convexity. The applicability can be extended considerably by further generalization to invexity and of maximum to quasimax. Some qualitatively different effects may occur with nonconvex models, such as nonunique optima at different objective levels and jumps in the consumption function, which have economic significance. This paper describes these effects and relates them to mathematical concepts.

Currently, traditional development issues such as economic stagnation, poverty, hunger, and illness as well as newer challenges like environmental degradation and globalisation demand attention. Sustainable development, including its economic, environmental and social elements, is a key goal of decisionmakers. Optimal economic growth has also been a crucial goal of both development theorists and practitioners. This paper examines the conditions under which optimal growth might be sustainable, by assessing the costs and benefits of growth. Key environmental and social aspects are considered. The Ecol-Opt-Growth-1 model analyses economic–ecological interactions, including resource depletion, pollution, irreversibility, other environmental effects, and uncertainty. It addresses some important issues, including savings, investment, technical progress, substitutability of productive factors, intergenerational efficiency, equity, and policies to make economic growth more sustainable—a basic element of the sustainomics framework. The empirical results support growing concerns that costs of growth may outweigh its benefits, resulting in unsustainability. Basically, in a wide range of circumstances, long term economic growth is unsustainable due to increasing environmental damage. Nevertheless, the model has many options that can be explored by policy makers, to make the development path more sustainable, as advocated by sustainomics. One example suggests that government supported abatement programs are needed to move towards sustainable development, since the model runs without abatement were infeasible. The optimal rate of abatement increases over time. Abatement of pollution is necessary to improve ecosystem viability and increase sustainability. Further research is necessary to seek conditions under which alternative economic growth paths are likely to become sustainable.

This paper presents a vector optimization approach to social choice in the form of the determination of social welfare optimum. While such applications of vector optimization are well developed within the economics literature, this paper shows that some useful extensions are possible. These extensions involve the adoption of some theory and concepts developed in modern mathematics including weak Pareto optimality, quasimax, weak quasimax, locally proper weak quasimax, and invexity. These extensions make the choice of social welfare optimum less restrictive

This paper questions conventional approaches to measuring social welfare through gross domestic product (GDP). This paper is divided into two parts. The first part adopts a systems approach to development and incorporates this into the theory of social choice. The second part operationalises this approach through the development of a cost-benefit adjusted gross domestic product (CBAGDP) social welfare function, which overcomes certain limitations of this traditional measure of development. The CBAGDP is then used to estimate welfare in Thailand. This approach is justified because of its normative values and its plausible results.

Over the past decades, many Asian economies have achieved striking levels of economic growth. This economic growth has been necessary in order to fulfil the material needs and aspirations of growing populations. However, it has also been accompanied by substantial environmental degradation. While the precise interactions between economic growth, economic development and environmental degradation is subject to controversy and a comprehensive assessment of the Asian environment may be required to fully understand this relationship and the present conditions of the environment, it is argued in this paper that the achievement of sustainable economic development and the harmonizing of economic and environmental objectives will not be possible without deliberate policy interventions. Such policies need to incorporate a regional dimension in the form of institution building, in parallel to the concept of regional economic growth. The article focuses on the current problems of environmental and natural resource degradation in Asia, within a possible conceptual framework of 'impoverishing or unsustainable economic growth, and suggests a set of policies that need to be adopted in order to solve current difficulties.

A series of stock prices typically shows a large trend and smaller fluctuations. These two parts are often studied together, as if parts of a single process; but they appear to be separately caused. In this paper, the two parts are analyzed separately, so that one does not distort the other, and some spurious interaction terms are avoided. This contributes a model, in which a wide range of features of stock price behavior are identified. With logarithms of stock prices, the two parts become of more comparable size. This is found to lead to a simpler additive model. On a logarithmic scale, the stock prices show the trend as a straight line (which can be extrapolated), with added fluctuations filling a narrow band. The trend and fluctuations are thus separated. The trend appears to be largely generated by a positive feedback process, describing investor behavior. The width of the fluctuation band does not grow with time, so positive feedback is not its cause. The movement of stock prices can be understood by analyzing the trend and fluctuations as separate processes; the latter considered as a stationary stochastic process with a scale factor. This analysis is applied to a historical dataset [Formula: see text] index of daily prices from February 1928). Here, the fluctuations are autocorrelated over short time intervals; there is little structure, except for market crash periods, when variability increases. The slope of the trend showed some jumps, not predictable from price history. This approach to modeling describes many aspects of stock price behavior, which are usually discussed in behavioral finance.

Increased environmental problems in the form of global warming have reshaped human thinking about the prospects of human survival on this planet. The 1996 IPCC study has confirmed that increased GHG concentrations in the atmosphere will substantially increase global temperatures. South East Asia's (SEA) particular vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change need to be explored. The primary production levels, tourism industry, agricultural productivity, energy sector and urban water supply systems are sensitive to potential climate changes. To address these issues and options, the study undertakes an integrated climate change and economic growth modelling study with a comprehensive coverage of the SEA region. The model is based on the work done by Nordhaus (the DICE model) and Islam (the Asia-DICE model), and named the South East Asia Dynamic Integrated Climate and the Economy (SEADICE) model. The results address issues related to global environmental change and sustainable development for SEA. The results suggest the following: 1) GHG abatement costs are justifiable for the region; 2) optimal abatement control rates are significantly higher compared to other models; and 3) this suggests that regional or country specific abatement policies should be implemented in the region.