Consumers pay more and more attention to the quality of perishable foods, which is mainly affected by storage temperature. This paper presents a dynamic pricing model for perishable foods under temperature control. To maximize the total profit, the optimal price and storage temperature are obtained using Pontryagin’s maximum principle. A static pricing model is provided to compare with the dynamic one. It is shown by a numerical example that the dynamic policy can make more revenue than the static one. Moreover, the managerial implications are analyzed and the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has been one of the core issues of the world climate summits under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in recent years. However, the GCF has not progressed smoothly, and currently there are no satisfactory schemes for raising and distributing the fund. This paper first discusses how to finance the GCF among Annex II countries. It introduces the’ preference score compromises’ (PSC) approach which is based on environmental responsibility and economic capacity, with historical emissions as an indicator for environmental responsibility and GDP as indicator for economic capacity. The results show that the United States and the European Union are the two largest contributors to the GCF, sponsoring more than 80% of the funds. Second, we discuss how to allocate the funds among non-Annex II parties. The ‘adaptation needs’ (AN) approach, which takes account of economic strength and climate damages, is proposed to achieve the adaptation purpose of the GCF, and the results reveal that African countries with high levels of climate vulnerability could get most funds, with a share of almost 30%. Regarding the mitigation purpose of the GCF, this research introduces two approaches: the ‘carbon reduction contribution’ (CC) approach and the ‘incremental cost’ (IC) approach. Both approaches could achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions in non-Annex II parties, whereas the latter may provide limited adaptation finance but result in more mitigation effects. This paper also develops a method to combine abatement efficiency and adaptation fairness of the GCF, and we find that with an equal split between the AN and CC (or AN and IC) approaches, the amount of USD 100 billion could finance an emissions reduction of 1613 MtCO₂ (2477 MtCO₂), while allocating USD 16 (or USD 9) per capita for adaptation in non-Annex II parties. The schemes proposed may be useful for promoting the development of the GCF in the future.

We consider dynamic capacity booking problems faced by multiple manufacturers each outsourcing certain operations to a common third-party firm. Each manufacturer, upon observing the current state of the third-party schedule, books capacity with the objective to jointly minimize holding costs that result from early deliveries, tardiness penalties due to late deliveries, and third-party capacity booking costs. When making a reservation, each manufacturer evaluates two alternative courses of action: (i) reserving capacity not yet utilized by other manufactures who booked earlier; or (ii) forming a coalition with a subset or all of other manufacturers to achieve a schedule minimizing coalition costs, i.e., a centralized schedule for that coalition. The latter practice surely benefits the coalition as a whole; however, some manufacturers may incur higher costs if their operations are either pushed back too much, or delivered too early. For this reason, a cost allocation scheme making each manufacturer no worse than they would be when acting differently (i.e., participating in a smaller coalition or acting on their own behalf,) must accompany centralized scheduling for the coalition. We model this relationship among the manufacturers as a cooperative game with transferable utility, and present optimal and/or heuristic algorithms to attain individually and coalitionally optimal schedules as well as a linear program formulation to find a core allocation of the manufacturers’ costs.

In this paper, we address a basic production planning problem with price dependent demand and stochastic yield of production. We use price and target quantity as decision variables to lower the risk of low yield. The value of risk control becomes more important especially for products with short life cycle. This is because, the profit implications of low yield might be unbearable in the short run. We apply Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) to model the risk. CVaR measure is a coherent risk measure and thereby having nice conceptual and mathematical underpinnings. It is also widely used in practice. We consider the problem under general demand function and general distribution function of yield and find sufficient conditions under which the problem has a unique local maximum. We also both analytically and numerically analyze the impact of parameter change on the optimal solution. Among our results, we analytically show that with increasing risk aversion, the optimal price increases. This relation is opposite to that of in Newsvendor problem where the uncertainty lies in demand side.

With the explicit consideration of user heterogeneity, i.e., each user has a different value of time (VOT), this paper examines the system efficiency and social equity of toll revenue redistribution in a bi-mode transportation system. Three schemes of distributing the road toll revenue are proposed, which respectively consider efficiency, equity, as well as efficiency and equity together. With mild assumptions, we prove that the number of auto-motorists decreases and the total social cost increases with transit subsidy share when only marginal operating cost of the transit is covered by its fare. However, when average fixed cost of the transit is further covered, the total social cost is a “U” shape curve against the transit subsidy share. Numerical results show that the well designed toll revenue redistribution schemes can make the system more equitable while keeping high efficiency. With the increase of user heterogeneity, the Gini coefficient becomes larger while the total social cost goes down.

This paper investigates the influence of low-carbon policies on channel coordination for a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one supplier and one retailer. Four different models are considered: the basic model, the carbon emission model, the carbon emission trading model and the carbon tax model. We find that the government policy on all carbon emission models is not universal among the firms as well as the customers. The carbon emission trading policy is always better than the carbon emission policy and the carbon tax policy when the allocated carbon emission quotas are greater than the carbon emissions. The carbon emission trading policy is proved to be an effective mechanism which can motivate the supply chain to reduce carbon emissions. Under certain conditions, the supply chain prefers the carbon emission trading policy with higher carbon price to other policies. In the framework of Stackelberg game with the supplier as the leader, for each carbon policy, the paper presents coordination mechanism with the all-unit wholesale quantity discount contract (AWQD). We analyze and compare the influence of low-carbon policies on channel coordination for the four low-carbon policies. Numerical experiments are conducted to examine our findings.

In group decision making, a certain degree of consensus is necessary to derive a meaningful and valid outcome. This paper proposes a consensus reaching model for a group by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It supports people to improve their group consensus level through an updating of their judgments. In this model, a moderator suggests the most discordant decision maker to update his judgment in each step. The proposed consensus reaching model allows decision makers to accept or reject the suggestion from the moderator. This model ensures that the judgment updating is effective and the final solution will be of acceptable consistency. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the validity of the proposed consensus reaching model.