Managerial and Decision Economics最新文献

Customer participation in new product development (NPD) has various advantages and disadvantages, research has proven that its beneficial factors are more in the early stages. The key in the initial phase of NPD is to understand the real needs of customers. In recent years, research in this field has been done mainly through questionnaires or data mining. However, most of the research have ignored the fact that customer preferences are private information and the influence of different customer groups on their willingness to participate. Because the selection of new product ideas takes place in the early stages of NPD and the degree of advance of customers is also an important parameter that indicates their willingness to cooperate in NPD activities, this paper will study the mechanism of private transfer of customers. Preferences will be considered in the selection phase of NPD concepts and their top grade. Results showed that the leading customers have reasonable motivation to participate in new product development, and advanced customers are more willing to express their product viewpoints.

We delve into the incorporation of demand information forecasting and the subsequent information sharing in a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC). We consider the competition between an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and an independent remanufacturer (IR). The OEM autonomously determines whether to forecast demand information and further considers whether to disseminate the realized demand signal to the IR. We find that the IR adopts either a partial- or a full-remanufacturing strategy to compete with the OEM. The OEM shares negative demand signals with the IR, as such signals decrease the retail prices and increase the production quantity of all-new products. Additionally, the sharing of negative demand signals helps alleviate the cannibalization effect caused by the introduction of remanufactured products. When examining the optimal sharing strategy in equilibrium, the OEM only invests in forecasting demand if the forecasting cost is relatively low. Furthermore, the numerical studies reveal that, in equilibrium, the OEM does not necessarily benefit from possessing more precise demand information. Additionally, we assess the influence of consumers' environmental awareness on the production decisions of both companies. The findings indicate that heightened environmental awareness prompts the IR to adopt a full-remanufacturing strategy, and the information management strategies remain robust.

Blockchain provides a new opportunity to govern the dilemmas in the knowledge payment product supply chain. This paper introduces blockchain into the evolutionary game to explore the behavioral strategies of knowledge providers, platforms, and consumers and to analyze in depth the influence of initial willingness and blockchain-related factors by the system dynamics. The analysis shows that (1) improving the tripartite initial willingness is conducive to accelerating the process of supply chain governance and making the system reach an ideal state: knowledge providers choose compliance creation, platforms adopt blockchain, and consumers buy authorized product; (2) there are specific thresholds for the blockchain adoption cost and the premium of product brought by blockchain, only when the cost and premium are lower than the thresholds, the system evolves towards the ideal state; (3) when blockchain is adopted, it can effectively inhibit knowledge providers' illegal creation behavior and consumers' piracy behavior by increasing the punishments of platforms on knowledge providers and consumers. The results provide guidance to implement effective governance and the orderly development of knowledge payment industry.

We study firms' optimal pricing and quality selection in the advance period and the spot period under the information asymmetry. Our study theoretically demonstrates that the advance price as a signal of quality information can affect the separating and pooling equilibrium. Importantly, we find that separating equilibrium is more favorable for high cost-efficiency if consumers have low prior probability that the firm is high cost-efficiency. For the firm with low cost-efficiency, the benefit of the separating equilibrium is the same as information is common sense. But no matter which equilibrium firms choose, they will target all consumers during the spot period.

Bribery in international business is an important field of study, but lack of research examines which types of firms are more likely to pursue bribery transfer, or subcontracting bribery-related transactions to the third party or intermediaries, instead of handling themselves. We conduct an empirical investigation into this issue using rich data from the PCI survey, which has been conducted annually in Vietnam during the period 2017–2020. The empirical results show that, in dealing with risks associated with bribery engagement, foreign-invested firms in Vietnam pursue two different types of risk self-controlling and risk transferring. Investors from OECD countries, subsidiaries of multi-national corporations, and firms with larger bribery amount are more likely to pursue risk transferring strategy by subcontracting bribery-related transactions to intermediaries, compared to the other firms' cohorts. Firms operating a longer time in Vietnam and bigger sized ones are more likely to follow risk self-controlling strategy by handling bribery-related transactions themselves. These results are robust while controlling for firms' legal status, year-fixed effects, and, especially, nonresponse and selection biases, which are inherent in the bribery decision process. This study thus contributes greatly to international business in emerging economies where foreign-invested firms exhibit heterogenous motives in dealing with risks associated with bribery-related transactions.

To analyse the relationships amongst technology innovation, servitisation, human capital structure and performance in manufacturing firms, a sample of 1247 manufacturing firms listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020 were collected. The conclusions are as follows. (1) Technological innovation has positive effect on performance. (2) Service transformation can mediate the effect of technological innovation on performance. (3) Advanced human capital skills can positively moderate the effect of service transformation on performance, whereas advanced human capital education can positively moderate the effect of technological innovation on performance. (4) The effect differs by firm type and location.

This paper studies the joint decision-making problem of investment and pricing in a mobile game supply chain with a game developer and a distribution platform with different risk attitudes. The investment here involves the mobile game's quality investment during the development process and promotion investment during the operation process. First, the mean–variance utility theory is used to describe the risk attitudes of the supply chain participants. On this basis, considering the mobile game's individualized operational characteristics with respect to production and sales, the supply chain's and its participants' decision-making models are established with the expected utility as an objective function. Second, the supply chain collaboration is modeled as a Stackelberg game. This paper obtains the optimal decisions of the participants and reveals the effects of the participants' risk attitudes on the optimal quality investment, promotion investment, and pricing policy. Finally, this paper further reveals the relationship between participants' risk attitudes and their expected profits. It is found that participants' risk attitudes will change the relationship between the expected profits under centralized decision-making and those under decentralized decision-making. These characteristics remain valid when a different demand format is employed or the supply chain members play a Nash game.

Customer choice behavior is increasingly influenced by the reference price effect and negative network effect as customers become more rational and personalized. This study, considering customers as pivotal stakeholders for enterprise development, employs the multinomial logit (MNL) model and develops pricing and strategy optimization models for pure bundling and mixed bundling strategies of an enterprise's product line. The main focus is to analyze how these effects impact optimal pricing and strategy selection. The results indicate that stronger effects lead to lower enterprise profits, and ignoring them can cause substantial losses. Generally, mixed bundling strategies yield higher profits.

This study examines how AI impacts the internal pay gap within enterprises. Using data from listed companies in China and a panel data two-way fixed effect model, findings reveal that AI widens pay gap, with executives in AI-applied companies earning 0.327 times more than average employees. AI increases executive pay while hindering employee salary growth, especially in nonmanufacturing and private firms. Labor substitution AI reduces employee compensation growth, whereas labor enhancement AI boosts executive pay without affecting employee compensation. AI also influences personnel structure and enterprise investment in fixed assets and R&D, highlighting its “job substitution effect” and “productivity effect”.