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This paper addresses a problem involving a principal and a potentially large number of agents , in which the principal requires some rule which will ensure that agents are rewarded according to their effort. When the resources available make it impossible for the principal to monitor each agent's performance, it is desirable to ensure that any rule which is applied will encourage truthful...
A scheduling method for a single machine scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times is presented where similar products produced on the machine can be partitioned into families. A two-stage traveling salesman heuristic procedure is developed. In the first stage an n n symmetric setup time matrix is generated for n products and the products are classified into families (groups) using...
Research in human information processing demonstrates that the presence of irrelevant information has an adverse effect on the quality of decisions. Decision makers are unable to identify and separate the effect of irrelevant information, thereby reducing the quality of decisions. The propensity to overutilize irrelevant information is significant because present day work environments are increasingly...
In any situation of fixed capacity and a perishable service or product, firms want to avoid spoilage of the service or product and receive the most revenue possible in the face of uncertain demand. Stimulation of demand from price-sensitive customers, however, through discount prices to customers that reserve early can help fill capacity. This is attractive if non-price-sensitive customers can be...
For years many researchers and practitioners have been calling for a more boundary-spanning or cross-functional view of the management of businesses. As any student of optimization will note, the combination of several optimized sub-systems will rarely, if ever, result in a globally optimized system. It is much the same with a business. Decisions that may appear extremely good within the confines...
Decision support systems (DSS) have been an active area of research and application for more than 20 years. The role and benefits of DSS are widely recognized today around the world. Drawing from diverse, reported (success and failure) stories of DSS deployment, we develop an agenda for driving DSS research and development (R & D) into the next century. The guiding philosophy in the agenda...
The delivery of health services represents one of the most daunting challenges confronting contemporary management. The complexity of the issues involved suggests that health service policy makers seeking to allocate scarce resources would find the opportunities offered by large scale modelling attractive. However, the application of such models to strategic management of the health services has...
This paper presents a new technique for helping managers to talk through and develop their view of difficult and complex issues, which are given expression by arranging a collection of objects, some of them symbolically rich, in an arrangement or sculpture . At the same time, the managers describe and develop the meanings being given to, and the relationships between, the objects. The technique...
Traditionally, raising the level of technology is considered the most effective way to improve productivity. Nevertheless, without the support of sound management systems, the contribution of technology to productivity is limited. In a sample of fifteen machinery firms, this paper calculates three indices for automation technology, production management, and productivity, respectively, to represent...
A model of repeated choices is presented where the current choices of an agent are affected by the decisions taken by the others in the past. Whereas in the single choice framework positive feedback leads to non-ergodicity, positive feedback in the repeated choice model generally leads to ergodic processes. Non-ergodicity is obtained only for very special cases.
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