Remaining life estimation of used components in consumer products: Life cycle data analysis by Weibull and artificial neural networks

Environmental awareness and legislative pressures have made manufacturers responsible for the take-back and end-of-life treatment of their products. To competitively exploit these products, one option is to incorporate used components in “new” or remanufactured products. However, this option is partly limited by a firm's ability to assess the reliability of used components. A comprehensive two-step approach is proposed. The first stage phase statistically analyzes the behavior of components for reuse. A well-known reliability assessment method, the Weibull analysis, is applied to the time-to-failure data to assess the mean life of components. In the second phase, the degradation and condition monitoring data are analyzed by developing an artificial neural network (ANN) model. The advantages of this approach over traditional approaches employing multiple regression analysis are highlighted with empirical data from a consumer product. Finally, the Weibull analysis and the ANN model are then integrated to assess the remaining useful life of components for reuse. This is a critical advance in sustainable management of supply chains since it allows for a better understanding of not only service requirements of product, but the remaining life in a product and hence its suitability for reuse or remanufacture. Future work should assess: (1) reduction in downtime of process equipment through the implementation of this technique as a means to better manage preventative maintenance; (2) reduce field failure of remanufactured product; (3) selling-service strategy through implementation of the proposed methodology.     

The Exchange Rate and Inflation in the UK

The United Kingdom is a highly open economy, and has a monetary policy strategy of targeting inflation in consumer prices. In this paper, we look at the evidence from the UK on inflation behaviour, and examine the propositions from several theoretical models about inflation dynamics in an open economy, focusing in particular on the hypothesized connections between the exchange rate and consumer price inflation. Theoretical open‐economy macroeconomic models ‘cover the waterfront’ on this issue, ranging from ‘exchange rate disconnect’ to a rigid link between nominal exchange rate changes and inflation. We estimate on UK data the open‐economy Phillips curves implied by the alternative explanations. We argue that, of the alternatives considered, only a model where imports are modelled as an intermediate good, as in McCallum and Nelson (1999) , provides a reasonable match with the data. Unlike the standard model, in which imports are treated as a final consumer good, the intermediate‐goods specification provides support for a policy of CPI inflation targeting.     

Implementation of college admission rules

Summary We consider both Nash and strong Nash implementation of various matching rules for college admissions problems. We show that all such rules are supersolutions of the stable rule. Among these rules the lower bound stable rule is implementable in both senses. The upper bound Pareto and individually rational rule is strong Nash implementable yet it is not Nash implementable. Two corollaries of interest are the stable rule is the minimal (Nash or strong Nash) implementable solution that is Pareto optimal and individually rational, and the stable rule is the minimal (Nash or strong Nash) implementable extension of any of its subsolutions.We wish to thank Professor William Thomson for his efforts in supervision as well as his useful suggestions. We are grateful to the participants in his reading class, workshops at Bilkent University, University of Rochester, and in particular Jeffrey Banks, Stephen Ching, Bhaskar Dutta, Rangarajan Sundaram and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.     

Determinants of cross-border merger premia

Firms have a broad range of rationales for engaging in cross-border mergers and other forms of foreign direct investment (FDI); while some companies are in search of the cost advantages provided by foreign resources, other firms are primarily interested in gaining access to new markets. Although a significant amount of research has explored the patterns of FDI, little work has been done to assess what influences the value of cross-border mergers and, in particular, what determines why some cross-border mergers are expected to result in higher synergies when compared to others. This paper explores what characteristics of a merger are expected to increase the synergies that a firm will accrue from a cross-border merger by testing how a variety of factors impact the premia paid to effectuate a cross-border merger. We find that firms are willing to pay a higher premium to obtain greater control over foreign firms, and that this control is even more important in mergers involving firms in emerging markets. We also find that the factors affecting deal premia in cross-border mergers differ based on whether the acquirer has a high or low intangible asset intensity level.     

Contract length heterogeneity and the persistence of monetary shocks in a dynamic generalized Taylor economy

We develop the generalized Taylor economy (GTE) in which there are many sectors with overlapping contracts of different lengths. In economies with the same average contract length, monetary shocks will be more persistent when longer contracts are present. Using the Bils–Klenow distribution of contract lengths, we find that the corresponding GTE tracks the U.S. data well. When we choose a GTE with the same distribution of completed contract lengths as the Calvo, the economies behave in a similar manner.     

Turbulence in growing and declining industries

Turbulence over the industry life cycle is examined for the case of Portugal using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation, thus allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of product markets. Replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entrants plays a primary role in generating turbulence in high growth markets, while displacement of incumbents by recent entrants is the main selection force in declining markets. As the industry life cycle progresses, trial-and-error entry and entry mistakes decrease, and turbulence subsides.