Layout problem for an aircraft maintenance company tool room

A tool room of an aircraft maintainance company with 10000 tools is considered. These tools are borrowed by the mechanics when needed and must be returned before the end of shift. About 400 in-out transactions are handled by the storekeepers of the room. However, since the room is usually crowded with mechanics at their shift start/end times, the storekeepers are overloaded and significant productive manpower is held up in waiting for the tools. Therefore, the racks and tools in the tool room are required to be rearranged so that the handling time of the in/out transactions can be reduced.The racks are rearranged by heuristics and then tools are allocated to the racks according to request probabilities, which are estimated by the proportion of each tool's on-loan frequency to the total on-load frequency during December 1992. Effectiveness is measured by comparing the total rectilinear distance travelled to fetch the tools requested during 11–15 January 1993 based on the proposed changes, to that based on existing rack and tool arrangement. It was found that improvement by tool allocation according to the request probabilities could reach up to 39% with the existing rack arrangement. Furthermore, minor rearrangement on the racks could also reduce the distance travelled by 12%.     

Green technology co-patenting networks: international dynamics

The present study examined how the multi-country green technology co-patenting network structure evolved from 1997 to 2016. For that purpose, we used Social Network Analysis tools, which allowed us to assess the network structure from a visual and quantitative perspective. The results indicate that the network expanded as the number of participating countries and ties increased. In all periods, the network grew significantly centralized around a small group of countries, in which the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, France, and Canada had paramount weight. Emerging countries like India and China also stood out due to their growth over time, as they eventually managed to gain central positions in the network. Other developing countries remained marginal, such as Brazil.

     

Risk and Return in Fixed-Income Arbitrage: Nickels in Front of a Steamroller?

We conduct an analysis of the risk and return characteristicsof a number of widely used fixed-income arbitrage strategies.We find that the strategies requiring more \"intellectual capital\"to implement tend to produce significant alphas after controllingfor bond and equity market risk factors. These positive alphasremain significant even after taking into account typical hedgefund fees. In contrast with other hedge fund strategies, manyof the fixed-income arbitrage strategies produce positivelyskewed returns. These results suggest that there may be moreeconomic substance to fixed-income arbitrage than simply \"pickingup nickels in front of a steamroller.\"     

The Interplay of Customer and Product Innovation Dynamics: An Exploratory Study

The challenges of successfully developing radical or really new products have received considerable attention from a variety of marketing, strategic, and organizational perspectives. Previous research has stressed the importance of a market‐driven customer orientation, the resolution of market and technological uncertainty, and organizational processes such as cross‐functional teams and organizational learning. However, several fundamental issues have not been addressed. From a customer's perspective, a more innovative product tends to have uncertain benefits and requires customers to learn new behaviors. Customer preferences can, therefore, change as product experience and learning increase. From a firm's perspective, it is unclear how to be customer‐oriented under such dynamic preferences, and product strategies using evolving technologies will tend to interact with how customers learn about an innovation. This research focuses on identifying unresolved issues about these customer and product innovation dynamics. A conceptual framework and series of propositions are presented that relate both changing technology and customer learning to a firm's strategic decisions in developing and launching really new products. The framework is based on in‐depth interviews with high‐tech product managers across several sectors, focusing on the business‐to‐business context. The propositions resulting from the framework highlight the need to consider relevant customer dynamics as integral to a firm's product innovation process. Successful innovation strategies and future research challenges are discussed, and applications to better understanding customer needs and theories of disruptive innovation are examined. Several key insights for innovation success hinge on a broad, downstream orientation to customer needs and product innovation dynamics. To be effective innovators, firms must know their customers' customers and competitors as well as or better than their immediate customers do. Market research must extend downstream for a comprehensive understanding of customer needs dynamics. In the context of disruptive innovation, new dimensions of customer needs may become more valuable based on perceived downstream customer trends. Firms may also innovate on secondary needs because mainstream customers do not always give firms the design freedom to radically innovate on primary features. Understanding customer commitments and how they develop under evolving needs can help firms focus resources on innovative efforts more likely to be accepted by customers.     

Metatheoretical foundations for post-normal risk

The first goal of this paper is to sketch a three-part, synoptic framework that could ease the way beyond the current impasse of competition among the various metatheoretical orientations (e.g. realism vs. social constructivism, positivism vs. cultural theory, etc.) in the risk field. The framework will be constructed on a foundation of metatheoretical principles and its form will accommodate the best features of the competing orientations. Because the articulated principles will build first on a position of realism, we can refer to the framework as a whole as Reconstructed Realism (RR). Because the content of the framework comprises its first two key parts, ontological realism and epistemological hierarchicalism , we can refer to the content by the acronym OREH. The second goal of the paper is to epistemically connect the synoptic framework, RR, to a methodological framework for conducting risk analysis, thereby providing a bridge between theory and practice. The existing methodological framework that bears logical symmetry to RR is the one developed by Funtowicz and Ravetz in a suite of papers (1985; 1991; 1992; 1993; 1994) and which they call 'post-normal science'. Connecting RR- the synoptic framework under development- with postnormal science completes the third part of the framework, and the resulting product is properly labelled 'post-normal risk.' Our life of fishing is so perilous that even though we worship all the gods in the world, many of us still die untimely deaths. Noriko Ogiwara, Dragon Sword and Wind Child     

Libor manipulation?

On May 29, 2008 the Wall Street Journal published an article alleging that several global banks were reporting Libor quotes significantly lower than those implied by prevailing credit default swap (CDS) spreads. While acknowledging that the “analysis doesn’t prove that banks are lying or manipulating Libor,” it nevertheless conjectures that these banks may “have been low-balling their borrowing rates to avoid looking desperate for cash.”In this paper we compare Libor with other short-term borrowing rates, analyze individual bank quotes, and compare these individual quotes to CDS spreads and market capitalization data during three periods: 1/1/07-8/8/07 (Period 1), 8/9/07-4/16/08 (Period 2), and 4/17/08-5/30/08 (Period 3). We find some anomalous individual quotes, but the evidence is inconsistent with a material manipulation of the US dollar 1-month Libor rate.