No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 30-32)

A rapid urbanization process facilitated an enormous expansion of the cities and stimulated the development of the urban housing markets in China. The primary purpose of this thesis is to find factors influencing the urban housing prices. Based on the supply and demand theory, I examine housing prices in 95 cities in 2010 related to population growth, wages, manufacturing employment, human capital, pollution, and housing investment using a cross section data analysis. The empirical results indicate that all those factors are significantly related to the housing prices. I focus on population growth, a proxy for the urbanization process, as the core determinant to analyze housing prices in China. In addition, the results also find that cities located in the eastern area have averagely a higher productivity than the ones located in the mid-west, and the higher housing prices in the eastern area are explained by the higher level of population growth and wages.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-284). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

In this thesis, we study the statistical issues in lost sales inventory systems, focusing on the complexity arising from the stochastic demand. We model the demand by the Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution. The maximum likelihood estimator of the ZIP parameters taking censoring into account are derived separately for the newsvendor and the (s, S) inventory systems. We also investigate the effect of the estimation errors on the optimal policies and their costs. We observe from a simulation study that the MLE taking censoring into account performed the best in terms of cost as well as policy among various estimates. We then proceed to develop a Bayesian dynamic updating scheme of the ZIP parameters. It is applied to the newsvendor system. We perform a simulation study to investigate the advantage of the Bayesian updating approach over the traditional MLE approach. We conclude that the Bayesian pproach offers a better learning technique when one lacks of good understanding of the demand pattern in the first few periods. Since inventory policy affects the information acquisition and-the demand distribution updating process, how to determine the optimal inventory policy when the demand distribution is yet to be learned is the focus of the latter part of the thesis. We investigate the effect of demand censoring on the optimal policy in newsvendor inventory models with general parametric demand distribution and unknown parameter values. We provide theoretical proof of the conjecture that it is better off to adopt a higher than the myopic optimal policy in the initial periods when demand is learned in a censoring system. We show that the newsvendor problem with observable lost sales reduces to a sequence of single-period problems while the newsvendor problem with unobservable lost sales requires a dynamic analysis. We explore the economic rationality for this observation and illustrate it with numerical examples.

The three essays in this thesis address various problems in the general area of supply chain management. In general, supply chain management is concerned with management of the flow of goods, information, and funds among supply chain members, such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. As such, its scope includes timing and quantity of material flow, logistics, improving efficiencies in problems with several decision makers, etc. The first essay in this thesis considers the problem of improving coordination in a decentralized system of retailers, while the second one addresses stability and profitability of Internet-based supply exchange alliances. The third essay analyzes a logistics problem, of finding an optimal route for a capacitated vehicle which travels on a graph and which can perform pickups and deliveries. In the first essay, we study a three-stage model of a decentralized distribution system with n retailers who each faces a stochastic demand for an identical product. In the first stage, before the demand is realized, each retailer independently orders her initial inventory. In the second stage, after the realization of the demand, each retailer decides what portion of her residual supply/demand she wants to share with the other retailers. In the third stage, residual inventories are transshipped in order to possibly meet residual demands, and an additional profit is allocated among the retailers. We study the effect of implementing various allocations rules in the third stage on the levels of the residual supply/demand the retailers are willing to share with others in the second stage, and the tradeoff involved in achieving a solution which is also optimal for the corresponding centralized system. The second essay is concerned with the formation of Internet-based supply exchange alliances among three or fewer retailers of possibly substitutable products. We provide some conditions, in terms of product substitutability and quality of suppliers, which would lead to the formation of a three member alliance, or a two member alliance, or no alliance at all. We also study the effect of alliance structure and quality of suppliers on the profit of a retailer. The third essay considers a vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries (VRPD problem) on some special graphs. Some vertices on the graph represent delivery customers, and other vertices represent pickup customers. The objective is to find a minimum length tour for a capacitated vehicle, which starts at a depot and travels on the graph while satisfying all the requests by the customers without violating the vehicle capacity constraint, and returns to a depot. We have developed linear time algorithms for the VRPD problem on a path and on tree graphs, linear and O (|V| log |V|) algorithm for a VRPD problem defined on a path with parametric initial capacity, and quadratic and O (|V|² log |V|) algorithms for a VRPD problem defined over a cycle graph.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-150).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-97).