Sustainable supply chains: An introduction

Consideration is given to the convergence of supply chains and sustainability. In doing so, the focus on environmental management and operations is moved from local optimization of environmental factors to consideration of the entire supply chain during the production, consumption, customer service and post-disposal disposition of products. This is a critical and timely topic that captures increasing concerns over sustainability, whether driven by current legislation, public interest, or competitive opportunity. As such, sustainable development is a rich area for academic research that is still in its infancy and has the potential to affect future government policy, current production operations, and identify new business models. This paper provides a background to better understand current trends in this multidisciplinary field that intersect with operations management, and the research opportunities and challenges it presents.     

Big data technology: developments in current research and emerging landscape

In this study, big data studies (01/2015–6/2018) are reviewed and several highly cited papers are identified, which indicates a growing interest in the area of big data. The papers and proceedings from international peer-reviewed journals and ranked conferences were reviewed. We employed Principal component analysis and citation and co-citation analysis to identify themes of research emanating from these studies. Citation and co-citation analysis reveals that there is cross-functional nature of big data research, which permeates different business sectors and is influenced by themes in engineering and information management.     

Recent developments in financial economics and econometrics: An overview

Research papers in empirical finance and financial econometrics are among the most widely cited, downloaded and viewed articles in the discipline of Finance. The special issue presents several papers by leading scholars in the field on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and Econometrics”. The breadth of coverage is substantial, and includes original research and comprehensive review papers on theoretical, empirical and numerical topics in Financial Economics and Econometrics by leading researchers in finance, financial economics, financial econometrics and financial statistics. The purpose of this special issue on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and Econometrics” is to highlight several novel and significant developments in financial economics and financial econometrics, specifically dynamic price integration in the global gold market, a conditional single index model with local covariates for detecting and evaluating active management, whether the Basel Accord has improved risk management during the global financial crisis, the role of banking regulation in an economy under credit risk and liquidity shock, separating information maximum likelihood estimation of the integrated volatility and covariance with micro-market noise, stress testing correlation matrices for risk management, whether bank relationship matters for corporate risk taking, with evidence from listed firms in Taiwan, pricing options on stocks denominated in different currencies, with theory and illustrations, EVT and tail-risk modelling, with evidence from market indices and volatility series, the economics of data using simple model free volatility in a high frequency world, arbitrage-free implied volatility surfaces for options on single stock futures, the non-uniform pricing effect of employee stock options using quantile regression, nonlinear dynamics and recurrence plots for detecting financial crisis, how news sentiment impacts asset volatility, with evidence from long memory and regime-switching approaches, quantitative evaluation of contingent capital and its applications, high quantiles estimation with Quasi-PORT and DPOT, with an application to value-at-risk for financial variables, evaluating inflation targeting based on the distribution of inflation and inflation volatility, the size effects of volatility spillovers for firm performance and exchange rates in tourism, forecasting volatility with the realized range in the presence of noise and non-trading, using CARRX models to study factors affecting the volatilities of Asian equity markets, deciphering the Libor and Euribor spreads during the subprime crisis, information transmission between sovereign debt CDS and other financial factors for Latin America, time-varying mixture GARCH models and asymmetric volatility, and diagnostic checking for non-stationary ARMA models with an application to financial data.     

An introduction to mechanized reasoning

Mechanized reasoning uses computers to verify proofs and to help discover new theorems. Computer scientists have applied mechanized reasoning to economic problems but–to date–this work has not yet been properly presented in economics journals. We introduce mechanized reasoning to economists in three ways. First, we introduce mechanized reasoning in general, describing both the techniques and their successful applications. Second, we explain how mechanized reasoning has been applied to economic problems, concentrating on the two domains that have attracted the most attention: social choice theory and auction theory. Finally, we present a detailed example of mechanized reasoning in practice by means of a proof of Vickrey’s familiar theorem on second-price auctions.     

Supply chain finance: Historical foundations,current research,future developments

It is widely agreed that supply chains encompass and integrate material, information, and financial flows across organizations. There is a robust history and continually expanding research agenda investigating supply chain management practice and theory associated with material and information flows and processes. However, the management of financial flows from a supply chain perspective and in combination with the other flows, usually referred to as supply chain finance (SCF), has been under-investigated. Our understanding of SCF approaches and solutions in purchasing and supply management (PSM) is only starting to form. The purpose of this editorial is to provide some grounding of initial studies and concepts of SCF, illustrate new and emerging thought in this discourse with articles published in this special issue, and speculate how the SCF domain may evolve in theory and practice with the advent of new digital technologies and big data analytics.     

烟草商业企业绩效考核问题研究

我国烟草商业企业缺乏对工作岗位科学的工作分析和明确的岗位说明书,以此为基础构建的绩效考核制度和指标体系未从根本上改变内容空洞、针对性差的固有缺陷,致使考核出现"走过场"现象,考核流于形式,个别甚至演变成"人际关系考评"。文章立足于强化人力资源绩效考核的效用,提升其对员工队伍激励、引导的价值,使之成为能切实评估员工工作业绩、工作能力、发展资质等方面的高效管理工具。鉴于此,文章提出了几点改革和完善烟草商业企业人力资源绩效考核管理的构想。     

Scales of measurements: An introduction and a selected bibliography

Stevens' (1946) distinctions among nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio measurements have had a marked influence on researchers of social, psychological and statistical sciences. This paper reviews those distinctions and includes some comments concerning the applicability of different statistical techniques to each scale. A detailed bibliography is also provided.On study leave from Department of Statistics, University of Karachi, Karachi-32, Pakistan.     

New product introduction with costly search

In the usual model of product market search, a low search cost can turn out to have detrimental incentives on new product introduction as the low search cost erodes firms’ market power, attenuating the profit from innovation. This paper studies a model of monopolistic competition with costly search, where the point of departure is that of a fixed cost of initiating search. In this environment, a low search cost could turn out to be favorable to innovation. At a low search cost, more consumers may decide to start searching, possibly resulting in higher profits for firms in the larger market, despite the erosion of market power.     

New product introduction under demand uncertainty in competitive industries

A game-theoretic model is employed to examine the conditions under which firms in a duopoly, faced with a new product introduction opportunity of uncertain profitability (because of uncertainty in demand), choose to enter the market immediately or, alternatively, decide to wait, thereby avoiding the risk of failure. The implications for a firm's strategic behavior are contrasted with situations in which the competitor is believed to be (1) passive, implying that the firm expects to enjoy indefinite monopoly status if it introduces the new product, and (2) committed to a waiting strategy, implying monopoly status for a limited time period, if the new product is successful.     

城市空间生产批判——新马克思主义空间研究范式述评

20世纪60年代后,在西方发达国家出现了基于新马克思主义思想的空间研究热潮.这一研究最重要的特点是将马克恶学说引入空间研究领域并发展成为一种新的研究范式.从其空间批判的基本立场、历史唯物主义的主要视角、城市与城市化的核心内容、超学科的学术特征四个方面对其进行了述评.