Distributed decision making is described in this book from a hierarchical perspective. A unified approach allows to treat such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level decision making, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, hierarchical negotiations, and dynamic games within the framework of a general pair of functional equations. In doing so, the book covers the range from a multi-level one-person decision problem to a multi-person antagonistic planning and leadership situation. These general ideas are illustrated with numerous examples and real-life planning situations. In addition, the treatise provides a theoretical foundation for important problem areas in business administration such as hierarchical production planning, the problems of design and implementation, modern concepts in managerial accounting, and supply chain management.
Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to a paradigm shift. The book provides a unified approach to such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and leadership situations are covered. Numerous examples and real-life planning cases illustrate the concepts. The new edition has been considerably expanded by additional chapters on supply chain management, service operations and multi-agent systems.
Supply Chain Management concerns organizational aspects of integrating legally separated firms as well as coordinating materials and information flows within a production-distribution network. The book provides insights regarding the concepts underlying APS, with special emphasis given to modelling supply chains and successfully implementing APS in industry. Understanding is enhanced through the use of case studies as well as an introduction to the solution algorithms used.
Planning of actions based on decision theory is a hot topic for many disciplines. Seemingly unlimited computing power, networking, integration and collaboration have meanwhile attracted the attention of fields like Machine Learning, Operations Research, Management Science and Computer Science. Software agents of e-commerce, mediators of Information Retrieval Systems and Database based Information Systems are typical new application areas. Until now, planning methods were successfully applied in production, logistics, marketing, finance, management, and used in robots, software agents etc. It is the special feature of the book that planning is embedded into decision theory, and this will give the interested reader new perspectives to follow-up.
A series of papers on business, economics, and financial sciences, management selected from International Conference on Business, Economics, and Financial Sciences, Management are included in this volume. Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources and natural resources. The proceedings of BEFM2011 focuses on the various aspects of advances in Business, Economics, and Financial Sciences, Management and provides a chance for academic and industry professionals to discuss recent progress in the area of Business, Economics, and Financial Sciences, Management. It is hoped that the present book will be useful to experts and professors, both specialists and graduate students in the related fields.
Increasing customer needs, the globalization of markets and the evolution of e-commerce add to the complexity of logistic processes. In today's business, it is well understood that an effective management of logistic processes is impossible without the use of computer-based tools and quantitative methods. This book presents in a systematic way quantitative approaches to distribution logistics and supply chain management. The main orientation of the book is towards practical problem solving, and numerous case studies and practical applications are presented. The topics covered include: supply chain management, revers logistics, e-commerce, facility location and network planning, vehicle routing, warehousing, inventory control.
This book extends the existing demand fulfillment research by considering multi-stage customer hierarchies. Basis is a two-step allocation and consumption planning procedure. In the existing literature, it is assumed that the customer segments are ‘flat’. This means they can be sorted easily during the allocation planning step by a single central planner in decreasing order of profitability. In the subsequent consumption planning phase, if order requests differ in terms of profit margins, companies can render prioritized service in real time to their most profitable customers by consuming the reserved quotas.
What information should jurors have during court proceedings to render a just decision? Should politicians know who is donating money to their campaigns? Will scientists draw biased conclusions about drug efficacy when they know more about the patient or study population? The potential for bias in decision-making by physicians, lawyers, politicians, and scientists has been recognized for hundreds of years and drawn attention from media and scholars seeking to understand the role that conflicts of interests and other psychological processes play. However, commonly proposed solutions to biased decision-making, such as transparency (disclosing conflicts) or exclusion (avoiding conflicts) do not directly solve the underlying problem of bias and may have unintended consequences. Robertson and Kesselheim bring together a renowned group of interdisciplinary scholars to consider another way to reduce the risk of biased decision-making: blinding. What are the advantages and limitations of blinding? How can we quantify the biases in unblinded research? Can we develop new ways to blind decision-makers? What are the ethical problems with withholding information from decision-makers in the course of blinding? How can blinding be adapted to legal and scientific procedures and in institutions not previously open to this approach? Fundamentally, these sorts of questions—about who needs to know what—open new doors of inquiry for the design of scientific research studies, regulatory institutions, and courts. The volume surveys the theory, practice, and future of blinding, drawing upon leading authors with a diverse range of methodologies and areas of expertise, including forensic sciences, medicine, law, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. - Introduces readers to the primary policy issue this book seeks to address: biased decision-making. - Provides a focus on blinding as a solution to bias, which has applicability in many domains. - Traces the development of blinding as a solution to bias, and explores the different ways blinding has been employed. - Includes case studies to explore particular uses of blinding for statisticians, radiologists, and fingerprint examiners, and whether the jurors and judges who rely upon them will value and understand blinding.
The volume comprises the proceedings of the second International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics LDIC 2009. The scope of the conference was concerned with the identification, analysis, and description of the dynamics of logistic processes and networks. The spectrum reached from the planning and modelling of processes over innovative methods like autonomous control and knowledge management to the new technologies provided by radio frequency identification, mobile communication, and networking. The growing dynamics confronts the area of logistics with completely new challenges: It must become possible to rapidly and flexibly adapt logistic processes and networks to continuously changing conditions. LDIC 2009 provided a forum for the discussion of advances in that matter. The volume consists of one invited paper and of 47 contributed papers divided into various subjects including mathematical modelling in transport and production logistics, routing in dynamic logistic networks, sustainable collaboration and supply chain control policies, information, communication, autonomy, adaption and cognition in logistics, radio frequency identification in logistics and manufacturing networks, applications in production logistics, and logistic solutions for ports, container terminals, regions and services.
