Chan Ying Leung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-89). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Importance of Reverse Auctions --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- A Research Gap in Existing Literatures --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Research Focus --- p.4 / Chapter 1.4 --- Contributions of This Thesis --- p.5 / Chapter 1.5 --- Organization of This Thesis --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Background and Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Review of Reverse Auctions --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Benefits of Reverse Auctions to Buyers --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Types of Reverse Auctions --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Implementation of the Entry-fee Reverse Auction --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2 --- Linkage between the Entry-fee Reverse Auction and the Multi- period Inventory Replenishment Model --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Multi-period Inventory Replenishment Model with TOQC --- p.17 / Chapter 3 --- The Basic Models --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1 --- Strategic Sourcing Methodology - The Entry-fee Reverse Auc- tion --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Numerical Example --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Operational Procurement Methodology ´ؤ The Multi-period Inventory Replenishment Model with TOQC --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Numerical Example --- p.33 / Chapter 3.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.34 / Chapter 4 --- Modifications Required for Integrating the Entry-fee Reverse Auction and the Multi-period Replenishment Model with TOQC --- p.36 / Chapter 4.1 --- Formulation of the Buyer's Expected Profit Function in the Multi-period Setting --- p.37 / Chapter 4.2 --- The Existence of Optimal TOQC --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Convexity of the Last-period Optimality Equation --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Convexity of the Two-period Problem --- p.41 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Convexity of the N-period Problem --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3 --- The Computability of the Optimal TOQC --- p.47 / Chapter 4.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.47 / Chapter 5 --- The Revised Model --- p.48 / Chapter 5.1 --- The Entry-fee Reverse Auction in the Multi-period Setting with TOQC --- p.48 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Numerical Example --- p.55 / Chapter 5.2 --- Chapter Summary --- p.59 / Chapter 6 --- Numerical Analysis --- p.60 / Chapter 6.1 --- Comparison between the Fixed-quantity Reverse Auction and the Entry-fee Reverse Auction --- p.60 / Chapter 6.1.1 --- Number of Supplier --- p.63 / Chapter 6.1.2 --- Retail Price --- p.65 / Chapter 6.1.3 --- Coefficient of Variation for Demand Distribution . --- p.66 / Chapter 6.1.4 --- Average Improvement --- p.67 / Chapter 6.2 --- Duration of the Entry-fee Reverse Auction Cycle --- p.68 / Chapter 6.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.76 / Chapter 7 --- Factors of Success for Holding the Entry-fee Reverse Auction --- p.77 / Chapter 7.1 --- Internal Organizational Infrastructure of the Buyer --- p.77 / Chapter 7.2 --- Supplier's Qualifications and Control --- p.78 / Chapter 7.3 --- Attractions of the Entry-fee Reverse Auction for Suppliers . . --- p.78 / Chapter 7.4 --- Procedural Fairness --- p.81 / Chapter 7.5 --- Total Cost Analysis --- p.81 / Chapter 7.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.82 / Chapter 8 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.83 / Bibliography --- p.85 / Chapter A --- Order Statistics --- p.90 / Chapter B --- Conditional Order Statistics --- p.92 / Chapter C --- Virtual Marginal Cost of Procurement --- p.93

The efficiency of revenue management relies on the effectiveness of the strategies it employs. In the competing market nowadays, time has become an important concern at both demand and supply sides. With time-sensitive customers and additional benefits from intertemporal demand shift, we find that the sellers could turn to a time-differentiation based strategy as an effective revenue management tool. Motivated by real-life business issues of Toyota China dealerships, in this thesis, we consider stylized inventory-control models with delivery upgrades, in which the seller allocates its on-hand inventory to price and delivery-time sensitive customers. The seller provides two delivery-time options with different prices. Customers choose the proper purchasing option according to their heterogeneous preferences. The seller has two decisions: inventory commitment and inventory replenishment. The former addresses, within an inventory cycle, how on-hand inventories are allocated between the two classes of customers. The latter addresses, between inventory cycles, how the inventory is replenished. Furthermore, the seller may employ early delivery, namely upgrade, to achieve a higher inventory flexibility. We develop the optimal inventory allocation and upgrade, and inventory replenishment policies, and demonstrate that the optimal control can be characterized by a switching curve. Based on the basic model setting, we extend our analysis to include cases of upgrade cost, stock-out substitution, and capacity constraint. We further discuss the joint pricing and inventory decision. We obtain the form of the optimal joint policy, and show that the two strategies may well complement each other in our setting. When each is applied separately, their performances are also compared. To shed more light on the practical side, finally, we use the Toyota dealership data to calibrate the required parameters, and demonstrate the potential of the optimal inventory allocation and upgrade control. / Liang, Xiaoying. / Advisers: Houmin Yan; Youhua Chen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-04, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-124). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

In the first model, we study the optimal procurement strategy in a two-period framework when both the spot market and the forward contract are considered. The forward contract is agreed upon in the first period, and is then delivered in the second period, when the spot market is also available. This is followed by production and demand. The objective of the buyer is to minimize his expected cost. We study the problem for two scenarios: the buyer cannot and can sell to the spot market. Through our analysis, when the buyer can not sell to the spot market, there exists a threshold forward price, under which the buyer will enter into the forward contract. This threshold is lower than the expected spot price. Furthermore, we analytically show that the optimal order quantities via forward contract increase in the mean of the spot price, but decrease in the variability of the spot price. However, the buyer only speculates using the forward contract when he can sell to spot market. / In the second model, we consider a problem in which a buyer makes procurement decisions when he faces periodic random demand and two supply sources, one is a long-term contract supplier and the other is a spot market. When he procures from the contract supplier, a fixed unit price is charged and a predetermined minimum quantity for each period must be committed, and when he procures from the spot market, a stochastic spot price plus a fixed setup cost is charged. The spot price is only realized at the beginning of each period. We show that the optimal policy consists three different (s, S) type policies. More important, we identify certain conditions under which there exist monotone properties between the policy parameters and the current spot price for a general Markov spot price process. Then, we can divide the price space into three regions, each of which corresponds to a specific policy, for each period. We also conduct numerical analysis to gain more insights into how the spot market impacts the buyer's performance. We find the buyers benefits from a more volatile market. / The last model extends the second model by incorporating an important feature that is widely seen; i.e., the procurement from the contract supplier should fulfill a total order quantity commitment (TOQC). The TOQC requires the buyer to procure no less than the predetermined commitment during the contract period, which we call the planning horizon. Thus, in each period, the buyer trades off between the possible lower cost now (by procuring from the spot market) and the reduced cost in the future (by reducing the remaining commitment). Two types of commitment contracts are considered: a minimal TOQC contract and a definite quantity contract. Our analysis characterizes an optimal procurement policy which depends on the spot price in each period and an optimal virtual remaining commitment level. Such a structured policy can be viewed as a combination of some policies of base-stock type, each of which can be computed through an equivalent system without any commitment. Moreover, some of these equivalent systems are of simple multiple-period newsvendor type. This greatly simplifies the computation of the optimal policies. We also numerically analyze how the TOQC and the spot market affects the buyer's performance. / This research develops mathematical models for inventory and procurement management in the presence of spot markets. More specifically, we consider those models by incorporating different types of supply contracts. Particular attention is paid to the quantity flexible contracts. This research is an attempt to understand how firms should adopt their operating policies in the presence of fluctuating commodity prices. In this thesis, we mainly consider the following three models. / Xue, Weili. / Adviser: Youhua Chen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-11, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-134). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.

Key words. Newsvendor Model, Inventory Model, Seasonal Product, Weather Risk, Weather Option, Weather Derivative, Weather-Conditional Rebate, CVaR, Mean-CVaR. / The first model considers the problem of hedging inventory risk for a newsvendor who sells a seasonal product. The newsvendor not only decides the order quantity, but also adopts a weather hedging strategy. A typical hedging strategy is to use an option that is constructed on a weather index before the season begins, which will compensate the buyer of the option if the actual seasonal weather index is above (or below) a given strike level. We explore the joint decision problem in mean-variance, expected utility, conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), and mean-CVaR frameworks. We analyze the impact of weather hedging on optimal order quantity. It is proven that the newsvendor may order more than in the absence of weather options. Numerical analysis on the sensitivity of the optimal order quantity, the risk premium of the option, the portfolio selection and the comparison between the weather option hedging and a particular operational hedging are presented as well. / The second model investigates the advantages of early sales of a seasonal product. To induce early sales, the newsvendor adopts a weather-conditional rebate program, which will pay rebates to the customers who buy the product in the preselling period if a specified weather condition for normal selling season is realized. For an example, a certain amount of refund will be paid to early buyer if the seasonal average temperature falls below the past-three-year seasonal average. Two conditional rebate programs with early booking and early purchasing are investigated and compared. Both of them can price differentiate within a customer among his/her post valuation on the seasonal product, and thus increase the sales. For the early purchasing program, it can further save inventory holding cost and ordering cost. The expected profit can be improved by the programs. Moreover, combined with weather derivatives, the conditional rebate program can manage the financial risk with the expected profit being still improved. / To investigate the means that firms may adopt in managing the adverse impacts of weather on their businesses, this dissertation proposes and analyzes two inventory models for seasonal products when the demand is sensitive to the weather in the season. Both models are formulated under the newsvendor context. / Gao, Fei. / "October 2007." / Adviser: Youhua Frank Chen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: B, page: 5002. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-119). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Finally, we study a multi-period, risk-averse inventory model. The objective is to maximize the expected pay-offs. The risk-averse behavior is modeled as to penalize the decision maker if a target-profit level is not satisfied for each financial reporting cycle. We recognize that the operational period is usually faster than the financial reporting cycle. Therefore, the financial reporting cycle can be considered as an integer times of the operational periods. We study this model under both accrual-basis accounting principle and cash-basis accounting principle. We prove that the optimal inventory policy is a state-dependent base-stock policy under the accrual-basis accounting method. We then show that the structure of an optimal policy is a complicated one for the cash-basis accounting method. / In this thesis we study three supply chain models which address downside risk from a different angle. We start with a commitment-option supply contract in a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) framework. We show that a CVaR trade-off analysis with advanced reservation can be carried out efficiently. Moreover, our study indicates how the corresponding contract decisions differ from decisions for optimizing an expected value. / Key words. Downside Risk Measure; CVaR; Risk; Loss-Averse; Dynamic Programming. / Owing to the growing globalization in economy and the advances in commerce, research in supply chain management has attracted large number of researchers in the last two decades. Yet standard treatments of supply chain models are mainly confined for the optimization of expected values with little reflection on risk considerations. Even for those that consider a risk measure in the objective function, there are quite few literatures employing downside risk measure. The downside risk measure takes into account only the part of the distribution that is below a critical value. Thus it indicates a safety-first strategy for decision maker. / The thesis is organized in five chapters. In Chapter 1, we provide the background and research motivation for considering downside risk measures in supply chain models. In Chapter 2, we study the pay-to-delay supply contracts with a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) framework. In Chapter 3, we study the loss-averse newsvendor problem. In Chapter 4, we extend the loss-averse model to a multi-period setting. We conclude the thesis in Chapter 5 with discussions for future research. / Then, we employ a loss-aversion utility function to characterize newsvendor's decision-making behavior. We find that when there is no shortage cost, the loss-averse newsvendor consistently orders less than a risk-neutral newsvendor. Further, we discover that the loss-averse newsvendor orders a constant quantity when the reference target is sufficiently large. We discuss the importance of initial inventory to achieve the target profit level. When the target is a decision variable, the newsvendor always sets the target no higher or no lower. / Ma, Lijun. / "October 2007." / Adviser: Houmin Yan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: B, page: 5003. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 140-154). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Assuming that all unmet demand is fully lost, we begin our study by confining the sales lever to be price only, that is, z = p , and ignoring the cost for executing the sales lever. Given a stationary (s, S, p) policy, we find that the profit function for the lost-sales case exhibits the same structure as the one for the backlogging case. We further show that the relaxed assumption on the news-vendor type profit function can also be satisfied by a broad class of demand function. We can therefore extend the optimizing algorithm and the optimality analysis developed earlier to the lost-sales case. We further demonstrate that the results can be extended to the general sales lever decisions. / Assuming that unmet demand is fully backlogged, a newsvendor-type profit function which is defined as the resulting expected one-period profit with sales lever being optimized for every inventory level, fails to be unimodal. By assuming the newsvendor-type profit function to have a finite number of local maxima, we develop an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal ( s, S, z) policy with the long-run average profit derived by the renewal theory. We further identify the conditions under which the (s, S, z) policy is globally optimal. / Issues on the interfaces between operations management and marketing research have attracted much attention recently. The developments integrating marketing decisions into inventory management are not only of academic interest, but also of practical importance. With uncertain demand, this research studies the joint determination of inventory and sales lever decisions such as price, incentives to salesforce, and short-term promotions, or a combination of them. / We consider a single-item, periodic-review system with the objective of maximizing the long-run average profit over an infinite planning horizon. Demand in a period is a non-negative, discrete random variable with its distribution dependent on the sales lever chosen for the period. A replenishment order can be placed at the beginning of a period incurring both fixed and variable ordering costs. The sales lever is determined jointly, and its execution may incur possible cost, for example, promotion cost. For such a model, we take particular interest in a so-called (s, S, z) policy, which operates as follows: whenever the inventory level falls to or below s, an order is placed to bring it up to S; when the inventory level is above s, no order is issued; the choice of sales lever z depends on the inventory level. / We finally conduct an extensive numerical study for both the backlogging and lost-sales cases. We compare the benefits of the dynamic sales lever strategy with those of the semi-dynamic as well as the static sales lever strategy, and find that the profit gains are significant. By sensitivity analysis, we bring out the impact of cost parameters on the optimal solutions. / Wei Ying. / "December 2006." / Adviser: Youhua Frank Chen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3961. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-131). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Li, Xu. / Thesis submitted in: December 2008. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-43). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.ii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background Study --- p.6 / Chapter 3 --- Model Formulation --- p.8 / Chapter 3.1 --- Trading Cost Function --- p.9 / Chapter 3.2 --- Notations and Optimality Equation --- p.11 / Chapter 4 --- Optimal Policy --- p.14 / Chapter 4.1 --- Preliminary Assumption and Results --- p.14 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- "Generalized (s, 5, H) Policy" --- p.14 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Polya Distribution and Quasi-K-convex --- p.15 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Assumptions --- p.20 / Chapter 4.2 --- Single Period Problem --- p.23 / Chapter 4.3 --- Finite-Period Problem --- p.30 / Chapter 4.4 --- The Algorithm --- p.36 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.39 / Bibliography --- p.41

published_or_final_version / Mathematics / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study developed a new conceptual framework of self-other agreement and used three samples to illustrate how national culture affected self-other agreement. These three samples included 428 participants from China, 818 participants from the US, and 871 participants from globally dispersed teams (GDTs). An EQS procedure and a polynomial regression procedure were used to examine whether the covariance matrices were equal across samples and whether the relationships between self-other agreement and performance would be different across cultures, respectively. The results indicated MSF could be applied to China and GDTs, but the pattern of relationships between self-other agreement and performance was different across samples, suggesting that the results found in the U.S. sample were the exception rather than rule. Demographics also affected self-other agreement disparately across perspectives and cultures, indicating self-concept was susceptible to cultural influences. The proposed framework only received partial support but showed great promise to guide future studies. This study contributed to the literature by: (a) developing a new framework of self-other agreement that could be used to study various contextual factors; (b) examining the relationship between self-other agreement and performance in three vastly different samples; (c) providing some important insights about consensus between raters and self-other agreement; (d) offering some practical guidelines regarding how to apply MSF to other cultures more effectively.