Virtual-Build-to-Order as a Mass Customization Order Fulfilment Model

Virtual-build-to-order (VBTO) is a form of order fulfilment system in which the producer has the ability to search across the entire pipeline of finished stock, products in production and those in the production plan, in order to find the best product for a customer. It is a system design that is attractive to Mass Customizers, such as those in the automotive sector, whose manufacturing lead time exceeds their customers' tolerable waiting times, and for whom the holding of partly-finished stocks at a fixed decoupling point is unattractive or unworkable. This paper describes and develops the operational concepts that underpin VBTO, in particular the concepts of reconfiguration flexibility and customer aversion to waiting. Reconfiguration is the process of changing a product's specification at any point along the order fulfilment pipeline. The extent to which an order fulfilment system is flexible or inflexible reveals itself in the reconfiguration cost curve, of which there are four basic types. The operational features of the generic VBTO system are described and simulation is used to study its behaviour and performance. The concepts of reconfiguration flexibility and floating decoupling point are introduced and discussed.

Essays in corporate finance

China has been growing rapidly over the last decades. The private sector is the driving force of this growth. This thesis focuses on firm-level investment and cash holdings in China, and the chapters are structured around the following issues. 1. Why do private firms grow so fast when they are more financially constrained? In Chapter 3, we use a panel of over 600,000 firms of different ownership types from 1998 to 2007 to find the link between investment opportunities and financial constraints. The main finding indicates that private firms, which are more likely to be financially constrained, have high investment-investment opportunity sensitivity. Furthermore, this sensitivity is relatively lower for state-owned firms in China. This shows that constrained firms value investment opportunities more than unconstrained firms. To better measure investment opportunities, we attempt to improve the Q model by considering supply and demand sides simultaneously. When we capture q from the supply side and the demand side, we find that various types of firms respond differently towards different opportunity shocks. 2. In China, there are many firms whose cash flow is far greater than their fixed capital investment. Why is their investment still sensitive to cash flow? To explain this, in Chapter 4, we attempt to introduce a new channel to find how cash flow affects firm-level investment. We use a dynamic structural model and take uncertainty and ambiguity aversion into consideration. We find that uncertainty and ambiguity aversion will make investment less sensitive to investment opportunities. However, investment-cash flow sensitivity will increase when uncertainty is high. This suggests that investment cash flow sensitivities could still be high even when the firms are not financially constrained. 3. Why do firms in China hold so much cash? How can managers’ confidence affect corporate cash holdings? In Chapter 5, we analyse corporate cash holdings in China. Firms hold cash for precautionary reasons, to hedge frictions such as financing constraints and uncertainty. In addition, firms may act differently if they are confident or not. In order to determine how confidence shocks affect precautionary savings, we develop a dynamic model taking financing constraints, uncertainty, adjustment costs and confidence shocks into consideration. We find that without confidence shocks, firms will save money in bad times and invest in good times to maximise their value. However, if managers lose their confidence, they tend to save money in good times to use in bad times, to hedge risks and financing constraint problems. This can help explain why people find different results on the cash flow sensitivity of cash. Empirically, we use a panel of Chinese listed firms. The results show that firms in China save more money in good times, and the confidence shock channel can significantly affect firms’ cash holdings policy.

Essays on Macroeconomic Trends and Cycles

This dissertation describes two studies on macroeconomic trends and cycles. The first chapter studies the impact of Information Technology (IT) on the U.S. labor market. Over the past 30 years, employment and income shares of routine-intensive occupations have declined significantly relative to nonroutine occupations, and the overall U.S. labor income share has declined relative to capital. Furthermore, the decline of routine employment has been largely concentrated during recessions and ensuing recoveries. I build a model of unbalanced growth to assess the role of computerization and IT in driving these labor market trends and cycles. I augment a neoclassical growth model with exogenous IT progress as a form of Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC). I show analytically that RBTC causes the overall labor income share to follow a U-shaped time path, as the monotonic decline of routine labor share is increasingly offset by the monotonic rise of nonroutine labor share and the elasticity of substitution between the overall labor and capital declines under IT progress. Quantitatively, the model explains nearly all the divergence between routine and nonroutine labor in the period 1986-2014, as well as the mild decline of the overall labor share between 1986 and the early 2000s. However, the model with IT progress alone cannot explain the accelerated decline of labor income share after the early 2000s, suggesting that other factors, such as globalization, may have played a larger role in this period. Lastly, when nonconvex labor adjustment costs are present, the model generates a stepwise decline in routine labor hours, qualitatively consistent with the data. The timing of these trend adjustments can be significantly affected by aggregate productivity shocks and concentrated in recessions. The second chapter studies the implications of loss aversion on the business cycle dynamics of aggregate consumption and labor hours. Loss aversion refers to the fact that people are distinctively more sensitive to losses than to gains. Loss averse agents are very risk averse around the reference point and exhibit asymmetric responses to positive and negative income shocks. In an otherwise standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) model, I study loss aversion in both consumption alone and consumption-and-leisure together. My results indicate that how loss aversion affects business cycle dynamics depends critically on the nature of the reference point. If, for example, the reference point is status quo, loss aversion dramatically lowers the effective inter-temporal rate of substitution and induces excessive consumption smoothing. In contrast, if the reference point is fixed at a constant level, loss aversion generates a flat region in the decision rules and asymmetric impulse responses to technology shocks. Under a reasonable parametrization, loss aversion has the potential to generate asymmetric business cycles with deeper and more prolonged recessions.

When Love Becomes Hate(?): The Interplay Between Consumer-Brand Relationships and Crisis Situations

This study had three purposes. First, it aimed to re-conceptualize organization-public relationships (OPRs) in public relations and crisis communication. This OPR re-conceptualization helps find out when the OPR buffering effect or the OPR love-becomes-hate effect happens. Second, it aimed to examine how consumer emotions are influenced by OPRs and influence consumer behavioral intentions. Third, it aimed to address the current problematic operationalization of the concept of consumer. Three pilot studies and one main study were conducted. Apple and Whole Foods were the two brands examined. One crisis that undermined the self-defining attributes shared between the brand and its consumers and another crisis that did not were examined for each brand. Almost 500 Apple consumers and 400 Whole Foods consumers provided usable questionnaires. This study had several major findings. First, non-identifying relationship and identifying relationship were different constructs. Moreover, trust, satisfaction, and commitment were not conceptually separate dimensions of OPRs. Second, the non-identifying relationships offered buffering effects by increasing positive attitudes and tempering anger and disappointment. The identifying relationships primarily offered the love-becomes-hate effects by increasing anger and disappointment. Third, if the crisis was relevant to consumers’ daily lives, brand response strategies were less effective at mitigating consumer negative reactions. Moreover, apology-compensation-reminder strategy was more effective compared to no-comment strategy. However, the apology-compensation-reminder strategy was no more effective than other strategies as long as brands compensate to the victims. Identifying relationships increased the effectiveness of response strategies. If the crisis did not undermine the self-defining attributes shared between consumers and brands, the response strategies worked even better. This study contributes to crisis communication research in multiple ways. First, it advances the OPR conceptualization by demonstrating that non-identifying relationship and identifying relationship are different concepts. More importantly, it advances the theory building of OPRs’ influences on crises by finding out when the buffering effect and the love-becomes-hate effect happen. Second, it adds to emotion research by demonstrating that strong OPRs can lead to negative emotions and positive emotions can have negative behavioral consequences on organizations. Third, the precise operationalization of the concept of consumer gives more insights about consumer reactions to crises.

Multi-level, Multi-stage and Stochastic Optimization Models for Energy Conservation in Buildings for Federal, State and Local Agencies

Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) project selection is made difficult given real-world constraints, limited resources to implement savings retrofits, various suppliers in the market and project financing alternatives. Many of these energy efficient retrofit projects should be viewed as a series of investments with annual returns for these traditionally risk-averse agencies. Given a list of ECMs available, federal, state and local agencies must determine how to implement projects at lowest costs. The most common methods of implementation planning are suboptimal relative to cost. Federal, state and local agencies can obtain greater returns on their energy conservation investment over traditional methods, regardless of the implementing organization. This dissertation outlines several approaches to improve the traditional energy conservations models. Any public buildings in regions with similar energy conservation goals in the United States or internationally can also benefit greatly from this research. Additionally, many private owners of buildings are under mandates to conserve energy e.g., Local Law 85 of the New York City Energy Conservation Code requires any building, public or private, to meet the most current energy code for any alteration or renovation. Thus, both public and private stakeholders can benefit from this research. The research in this dissertation advances and presents models that decision-makers can use to optimize the selection of ECM projects with respect to the total cost of implementation. A practical application of a two-level mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) improves the current best practice for agencies concerned with making the most cost-effective selection leveraging energy services companies or utilities. The two-level model maximizes savings to the agency and profit to the energy services companies (Chapter 2). An additional model presented leverages a single congressional appropriation to implement ECM projects (Chapter 3). Returns from implemented ECM projects are used to fund additional ECM projects. In these cases, fluctuations in energy costs and uncertainty in the estimated savings severely influence ECM project selection and the amount of the appropriation requested. A risk aversion method proposed imposes a minimum on the number of “of projects completed in each stage. A comparative method using Conditional Value at Risk is analyzed. Time consistency was addressed in this chapter. This work demonstrates how a risk-based, stochastic, multi-stage model with binary decision variables at each stage provides a much more accurate estimate for planning than the agency’s traditional approach and deterministic models. Finally, in Chapter 4, a rolling-horizon model allows for subadditivity and superadditivity of the energy savings to simulate interactive effects between ECM projects. The approach makes use of inequalities (McCormick, 1976) to re-express constraints that involve the product of binary variables with an exact linearization (related to the convex hull of those constraints). This model additionally shows the benefits of learning between stages while remaining consistent with the single congressional appropriations framework.

Risk management for mathematical optimization under uncertainty

We present a general multistage stochastic mixed 0-1 problem where the uncertainty appears everywhere in the objective function, constraints matrix and right-hand-side. The uncertainty is represented by a scenario tree that can be a symmetric or a nonsymmetric one. The stochastic model is converted in a mixed 0-1 Deterministic Equivalent Model in compact representation. Due to the difficulty of the problem, the solution offered by the stochastic model has been traditionally obtained by optimizing the objective function expected value (i.e., mean) over the scenarios, usually, along a time horizon. This approach (so named risk neutral) has the inconvenience of providing a solution that ignores the variance of the objective value of the scenarios and, so, the occurrence of scenarios with an objective value below the expected one. Alternatively, we present several approaches for risk averse management, namely, a scenario immunization strategy, the optimization of the well known Value-at-Risk (VaR) and several variants of the Conditional Value-at-Risk strategies, the optimization of the expected mean minus the weighted probability of having a "bad" scenario to occur for the given solution provided by the model, the optimization of the objective function expected value subject to stochastic dominance constraints (SDC) for a set of profiles given by the pairs of threshold objective values and either bounds on the probability of not reaching the thresholds or the expected shortfall over them, and the optimization of a mixture of the VaR and SDC strategies.

Attitudes towards risk in financial decision making

Doutoramento em Gestão

The impact of gender differences on consumer-brand relationships

Dissertação de Mestrado, Marketing, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, 2016

Barriers to colorectal cancer screening in Asia: A systematic review

Purpose: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is among the top five cancers afflicting both men and women globally. Once predominantly a Western disease, it has begun to rise in Asian countries as well. This systematic review aims to compile and analyze the various barriers towards colorectal cancer screening in Asia, and to determine if the barriers are consistent throughout the continent. Methods: Article Inclusion criteria for based on year of publication from year 2008 till 2015, has been conducted in Asia, and written in English language. A total of 23 studies were included in this review, chosen via primary search of journal websites and databases, and a secondary search through the reference lists of eligible articles. Results: It was found that major barriers of colorectal cancer screening are; poor education/knowledge, negative perceptions towards screening, aversion to test results, financial constraints, time constraints, lack of physicians’ recommendation, limited/difficult access to screening locations, fatalistic beliefs, low perceived risks, language barriers, confidence in traditional medicine/distrust in Western medicine, ignorance and old age. Conclusion: Lack of knowledge/education is the most critical barrier that is linked to a majority of other barriers that can hinder a person from undergoing CRC screening for early prevention, detection and treatment. Majority of these barriers encountered regarding the poor rates of CRC screening are similar across countries in Asia.

Économie comportementale : retrouve-t-on un effet d’ancrage dans la LNH ?

De par leur nature scientifique, les sciences économiques visent, entre autre, à observer, qualifier, ainsi que quantifier des phénomènes économiques afin de pouvoir en dégager diverses prévisions. Ce mémoire se penche sur ces prévisions et, plus particulièrement, sur les facteurs pouvant biaiser les prévisionnistes au niveau comportemental en référant à l’effet d’ancrage, un biais propre à l’économie comportementale – une sous-discipline des sciences économiques. Il sera donc question de comprendre, par une analyse selon la discipline que représente l’économie comportementale, ce qui peut les affecter, avec un accent mis sur l’effet d’ancrage plus précisément. L’idée générale de ce dernier est qu’un agent peut être biaisé inconsciemment par la simple connaissance d’une valeur précédente lorsqu’il est demandé de faire une estimation ultérieure. De cette façon, une analyse des salaires des joueurs de la Ligne Nationale de Hockey (NHL) selon leurs performances passées et leurs caractéristiques personnelles, de 2007 à 2016, a été réalisée dans ce travail afin d’en dégager de possibles effets d’ancrage. Il est alors possible de constater que les directeurs généraux des équipes de la ligue agissent généralement de façon sensible et rationnelle lorsque vient le temps d’octroyer des contrats à des joueurs mais, néanmoins, une anomalie persiste lorsqu’on porte attention au rang auquel un joueur a été repêché. Dans un tel contexte, il semble pertinent de se référer à l’économie comportementale afin d’expliquer pourquoi le rang au repêchage reste une variable significative huit ans après l’entrée d’un joueur dans la NHL et qu’elle se comporte à l’inverse de ce que prévoit la théorie à ce sujet.

Causes of Conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism in Haiti and the role of Vodou after Conversion

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the choice patterns that lead to conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism and the role of Vodou after conversion. This study highlights disappointment with the church as the leading cause of conversion in Haiti. Other causes significant to the study were examined. In illness and healing lie the controversies of religious conversion in Haiti. The only way to cure Satanic Illness is by resorting to magic. However, conversion to Protestantism means rejection of Vodou and all of its practice. A secondary purpose is to determine the role of Vodou after conversion. A total of 100 participants between the ages of 18 to 44 were included in this study. Seven percent (7%) converted for economic reasons, 43% selected disappointment with the church, 17% community/environment encounter, 13% sickness/near death experience, 2% economic and disappointment, 7% community/environment encounter and disappointment with the church, 9% disappointment sickness and near death experience, 1% economic and sickness near death experience, 1% economic and community/environment encounter. Findings suggest that Vodou is deeply rooted in Haitian identity, though all Haitians may not practice Vodou; but there are characteristics in the Haitian society that suggest that Haitians are Vodouisant. For the conversion process to be successful in Haiti it has to deeply acknowledged Vodou, the religion practiced by the masses in Haiti.

Of Taffeta and Soil

OF TAFFETA AND SOIL is a collection of poetry unified through images of Argentinean and Floridian soil, flora, and fauna, and by themes of geographic and emotional dislocation, memory, and the quest for home. These images are brought forth in lyrical poems that question the growth and settling of a romantic partnership, domestic turmoil and resolution, and the constant tension between self and community. Mostly written in free verse, the collection also utilizes forms such as prose poem, haiku, and sonnet, for more formal unity. Section one chronicles and explores a romantic relationship through attraction, passion, disappointment, and self-awareness. Section two is a long poem that centers on the speaker’s continuous struggle to come to terms with her present adult life while still remembering and idealizing a homeland. Finally, the collection ends with two sections that work toward self-acceptance, forgiveness, and evolution via community, family, travel and nature.

O insucesso em matemática no curso técnico em agropecuária integrado ao ensino médio IFB- Campus Planaltina

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Educação Social e Intervenção Comunitária

Économie comportementale : retrouve-t-on un effet d’ancrage dans la LNH ?

De par leur nature scientifique, les sciences économiques visent, entre autre, à observer, qualifier, ainsi que quantifier des phénomènes économiques afin de pouvoir en dégager diverses prévisions. Ce mémoire se penche sur ces prévisions et, plus particulièrement, sur les facteurs pouvant biaiser les prévisionnistes au niveau comportemental en référant à l’effet d’ancrage, un biais propre à l’économie comportementale – une sous-discipline des sciences économiques. Il sera donc question de comprendre, par une analyse selon la discipline que représente l’économie comportementale, ce qui peut les affecter, avec un accent mis sur l’effet d’ancrage plus précisément. L’idée générale de ce dernier est qu’un agent peut être biaisé inconsciemment par la simple connaissance d’une valeur précédente lorsqu’il est demandé de faire une estimation ultérieure. De cette façon, une analyse des salaires des joueurs de la Ligne Nationale de Hockey (NHL) selon leurs performances passées et leurs caractéristiques personnelles, de 2007 à 2016, a été réalisée dans ce travail afin d’en dégager de possibles effets d’ancrage. Il est alors possible de constater que les directeurs généraux des équipes de la ligue agissent généralement de façon sensible et rationnelle lorsque vient le temps d’octroyer des contrats à des joueurs mais, néanmoins, une anomalie persiste lorsqu’on porte attention au rang auquel un joueur a été repêché. Dans un tel contexte, il semble pertinent de se référer à l’économie comportementale afin d’expliquer pourquoi le rang au repêchage reste une variable significative huit ans après l’entrée d’un joueur dans la NHL et qu’elle se comporte à l’inverse de ce que prévoit la théorie à ce sujet.

Amor e criação: A universalidade das cartas portuguesas

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada no ISPA – Instituto Universitário para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Psicologia especialidade de Psicologia Clínica.