A further clarification of OCRA and its properties in response to Wang and Wang (2005)

This is an exposition written in response to the claims in Wang and Wang (2005) about the problems with the method of OCRA, operational competitiveness rating analysis, for gauging the relative performances of a set of operating entities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

State estimation of a shop floor using improved resampling rules for particle filtering

Operational inefficiencies in supply chains cost industries millions of dollars every year. Much of these inefficiencies arise due to the lack of a coherent planning and control mechanism, which requires accurate yet timely state estimation of these large-scale dynamic systems given their massive datasets. While Bayesian inferencing procedures based on particle filtering paradigm may meet these requirements in state estimation, they may end up in a situation called degeneracy, where a single particle abruptly possesses significant amount of normalized weights. Resampling rules for importance sampling prevent the sampling procedure from generating degenerated weights for particles. In this work, we propose two new resampling rules concerning minimized variance (VRR) and minimized bias (BRR). The proposed rules are derived theoretically and their performances are benchmarked against that of the minimized variance and half-width based resampling rules existing in the literature using a simulation of a semiconductor die manufacturing shop floor in terms of their resampling qualities (mean and variance of root mean square errors) and computational efficiencies, where we identify the circumstances that the proposed resampling rules become particularly useful.     

Aggregate Information and Organizational Structures*

We study information flows in an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determines the organization's overall efficiency. Under centralized communication, eliciting the agents' information may induce the principal to manipulate aggregate information, which obstructs an effective use of information. Under hierarchical communication, the principal concedes more information rent due to loss of control, but is able to use the agents' information more effectively. The trade-off between the organizational structures depends on the likelihood that the agents are efficient. Centralized communication is optimal when such likelihood is low. Hierarchical communication, by contrast, is optimal when it is high.     

Individual Differences in Within-Person Variability in Personality Positively Predict Economic Gains and Satisfaction in Negotiations

Group Decision and Negotiation - Prior research on the value of personality traits for predicting negotiation outcomes is rather inconclusive. Building on prior research and in light of recent...