Due to the fourth revolution experiencing, referred to as Industry 4.0, many production firms are devoted to integrating new technological tools to their manufacturing process. One of them, is rescheduling the tasks on the machines responding to disruptions. While, for static scheduling, the efficiency criteria measure the performance of scheduling systems, in dynamic environments, the stability criteria are also used to assess the impact of jobs deviation. In this paper, a new performance measure is investigated for a flowshop rescheduling problem. This one considers simultaneously the total weighted waiting time as the efficiency criterion, and the total weighted completion time deviation as the stability criterion. This fusion could be a very helpful and significant measure for real life industrial systems. Two disruption types are considered: jobs arrival and jobs cancellation. Thus, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed, as well as an iterative predictive-reactive strategy for dealing with the online part. At last, two heuristic methods are proposed and discussed, in terms of solution quality and computing time.

Personalized pricing is on the rise in the retail industry, and it’s been used in many service platforms. Personalized pricing assumes that the platform has an idea of who the customer is, and allows the platform to incentivize the customers based on their characteristics and actions. In this work, we consider a personalized pricing problem with revisiting customers. We assume a customer’s utility depends on some feature information and some unobserved personal shock. For the case where customer utilities are unknown, we propose a heuristic that combines the idea of binary search and feature-based pricing, and show that it outperforms common benchmarks. We also demonstrate that if we have some information about either the customer utility or the dependence on the feature information, then we can learn the other much faster, and this is what we mean by the synergy between customer segmentation and personalization. This observation can help managers make better personalized decisions for customers that repeatedly interact with the platform.

Delegated blockchain governance is the frontier of blockchain design issues that is to improve the scalability of blockchain networks. Delegated proof of stake (DPoS) blockchains such as EOS must select a few super nodes for transaction verification. In particular, the blockchain community has debated recently on whether dividend should be allowed when electing super nodes, which might be considered as unethical or unfair, leading to an open research topic and a new research gap that has theoretical value for both academia and industry. In this paper, we build a theoretical framework to study how dividend affects user decisions and welfare in a DPoS blockchain. Based on game theory, we propose a three-player Hotelling model with two policies to study the behaviors of voters and candidates. We first use a static game analysis to show that the benefits of dividend for voters and for candidates vary with the size of reward and there exists an interval, in which the zero dividend policy would be good for the welfare of both candidates and voters. Then, we use an evolutionary game analysis to examine the process dynamics of super node selection, we find that the campaign strategy of candidates has to do with the size of platform reward given to the candidates by the blockchain platform. Especially in the asymmetric case, we find that higher level of platform reward turns to benefit candidates with large number of votes even more. Our findings are instrumental for designing dividend policies in DPoS blockchains and can stimulate more potential research in blockchain governance.

This paper considers tripartite pricing issues in a two-echelon supply chain involving duopolistic manufacturers and a single retailer. Firstly, a tripartite competitive model is conducted, in which both a Stackelberg game and a Bertrand game occur simultaneously. It is shown that the manufacturer who possesses a higher sales quantity gains more profits than the other one. Secondly, a definition of optimal vertical pricing alliance is proposed when cooperation exists between the retailer and some manufacturer. We conduct two-player games when partial cooperation exists among the three participants. It is demonstrated that the total profit of the alliance is higher than the sum profit of the corresponding two participants in the tripartite competition model, and meanwhile the profit of the manufacturer who is not in the alliance suffers a loss. Further, a criterion is given to judge which manufacturer the retailer will choose to cooperate in order to maximize the total increased profits. From the perspective of game theory, we examine the stability of the vertical alliance with considering the dominance of the retailer. Finally, a numerical illustration is designed to examine the judging criteria of which manufacturer is the member of the optimal alliance under different potential market demands.

The objective of this paper is to identify time lag effect in the relationship between supply chain management and financial performance. We hypothesize that firms with higher supply chain management capability are associated with higher financial performance and the impact would last longer. In addition, we introduce two contextual variables, ownership and market orientation, to detect the moderating effect of ownership structure and organizational culture, respectively. We use firm-level empirical data from 1,131 public Chinese manufacturing firms for the 2010–2019 period to investigate the effect and the result shows that there is a two-year time lag effect in the relationship, which means the positive impact of current supply chain management would last for three years. Furthermore, we find evidence that supply chain management in non-state-owned firms is more efficient and its positive financial impact would last longer than that in state-owned enterprises. Finally, we indicate that market-orientation can’t moderate the relationship between supply chain management and financial performance.

Buying work safety services from intermediaries is a new and important approach to improve the work safety in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The existing literature addresses the significance and effectiveness of the service model but it ignores the dynamic game relationship between relevant stakeholders when SMEs choose to purchase the services under bounded rationality. Therefore, this study aims to analyse this dynamic game relationship based on evolutionary game theory. Furthermore, dynamic simulations of the evolutionary game model are applied to determine the impact of major factors for three stakeholders (SMEs, governments, and safety service agents), examine stability strategies, and identify modes of equilibrium under different subsidy strategies. The results of simulation are as follows. First, the results explain that how the major factors (service price, the quality of service, government subsidy, etc.) affect the system dynamic force of buying work safety services. Second, when the subsidy strategy is static payment, the selection of the stakeholders fluctuates and is not optimal. Third, when the subsidy strategy is a dynamic payment, the evolutionary game process converges to a stable state, which indicates that an evolutionarily stable strategy exists under the dynamic subsidy strategy. Moreover, the stable state and equilibrium values are not affected by the different initial values. The results of this study offer a certain reference for the government to guide the implementation of the purchase of work safety or other services in SMEs

This study investigates which factors determine the teenagers’ attitudes toward human life among different ethnic groups, based on a unique survey data from Xinjiang juvenile students with their family, school and social information. We find that environment factors and education efforts mainly affect the teenagers’ attitudes to life value, but their ethnic groups have no effects. Reverence of life does not come from which ethnic group one belongs in, but comes from one’s environment and education. Reverence of life need to be cultivated.