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This paper aims to investigate the dynamics of a coordinate monopoly with established, risk-neutral firms; how these firms compete by adjusting prices; and when new competition(s) might enter the market with expectations of making more profits than any of the incumbents.

All results are established on the intuition of systems research and the concept of Nash equilibria of game theory.

Established results include how in a developed marketplace, risk neutrality would lead to stagnation in profits and irrational decision on pricing, and a sufficient and necessary condition under which new competition(s) would enter, although the market is coordinately monopolized.

Conclusions presented are initial results in the direction of research. More real-life-like, asymmetrical conditions need to be considered to see what variations of similar results could hold true.

Presented are an operational aspect on how to compete although the consequent level of profits might not change much or any at all and how some of the key issues on market entry timing are theoretically resolved.

This work indicates that for the minimum objective of business survival, existing firms, no matter how established, have to without any choice participate in market competition and look for new market opportunities.

Other than the established thought-provoking results, this work is the first of its kind. It organically combines recent achievements of systems research with game theory to explore issues of marketing, market entry timing and the dynamics of business firms’ behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of peer pressure on joint consumption decisions among emerging adults. Building on prospect theory and characteristics of emerging adulthood, the authors propose that influence from peers (i.e. informational and normative influence) serves as a channel to understand how peer pressure shapes joint consumer behaviors at different levels of social capital.

An online survey is distributed to the emerging adults, aged 18 to 25, in the south, west, east and middle of the USA. Construct validity and reliability are tested by using confirmatory factor analysis. Structural equation modeling is used to test the mediating and moderating effects.

The results show that social capital moderates the relationship between peer pressure and group-oriented consumer decisions, such that the relationship is positive in groups with high-level social capital but negative in groups with low-level social capital. Furthermore, such effects tend to be achieved via peer influence. And peer influence is stronger in groups with high-level social capital than those with low-level social capital.

The current literature has shown contradictory results: it is usually believed that emerging adults may conform to pressure and engage in group-oriented decisions; however, some research has reported the opposite result. To better understand this relationship, the authors aim at a group-level factor – perceived social capital – as a boundary condition. This research contributes to the young consumer decision-making literature by involving the interplay among peer pressure, perceived social capital and peer informational and normative influence.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce two important principles of efficiency, one on the management of a business entity and the other on the structure of employees’ efforts and devotion toward realizing the mission of their organization.

All discussion and reasoning are established on some of the traditional methods of microeconomics and on the basis of the systemic yoyo model. Here, the yoyo model plays the role of intuition, while the traditional methods are utilized to present the exact details underneath the systemic thinking.

What is discovered include how management efficiency can be achieved by being flexible in terms of allowing individual employees to have conflicting personal values and how organizational inefficiency always exists no matter how the business entity is set up.

The established results are applicable in all business scenarios without foreseeable limitations.

By understanding these results, business managers could simply devote more of their time and effort on being flexible in terms of management styles and focusing on the “big” picture of the corporation instead of dwelling on how to improve employees’ efficiencies.

This paper establishes two very important, very useful results for managers. These results are expected to enrich the managerial understanding on what can be improved and what cannot.

This paper aims to establish a novel three-way decisions-based grey incidence analysis clustering approach and exploit it to extract information and rules implied in panel data.

Because of taking on the spatiotemporal characteristics, panel data can well-describe and depict the systematic and dynamic of the decision objects. However, it is difficult for traditional panel data analysis methods to efficiently extract information and rules implied in panel data. To effectively deal with panel data clustering problem, according to the spatiotemporal characteristics of panel data, from the three dimensions of absolute amount level, increasing amount level and volatility level, the authors define the conception of the comprehensive distance between decision objects, and then construct a novel grey incidence analysis clustering approach for panel data and study its computing mechanism of threshold value by exploiting the thought and method of three-way decisions; finally, the authors take a case of the clustering problems on the regional high-tech industrialization in China to illustrate the validity and rationality of the proposed model.

The results show that the proposed model can objectively determine the threshold value of clustering and achieve the extraction of information and rules inherent in the data panel.

The novel model proposed in the paper can well-describe and resolve panel data clustering problem and efficiently extract information and rules implied in panel data.

The proposed model can deal with panel data clustering problem and realize the extraction of information and rules inherent in the data panel.

The purpose of this paper is to survey and express the advantages and disadvantages of the existing approaches for solving grey linear programming in decision-making problems.

After presenting the concepts of grey systems and grey numbers, this paper surveys existing approaches for solving grey linear programming problems and applications. Also, methods and approaches for solving grey linear programming are classified, and its advantages and disadvantages are expressed.

The progress of grey programming has been expressed from past to present. The main methods for solving the grey linear programming problem can be categorized as Best-Worst model, Confidence degree, Whitening parameters, Prediction model, Positioned solution, Genetic algorithm, Covered solution, Multi-objective, Simplex and dual theory methods. This survey investigates the developments of various solving grey programming methods and its applications.

Different methods for solving grey linear programming problems are presented, where each of them has disadvantages and advantages in providing results of grey linear programming problems. This study attempted to review papers published during 35 years (1985–2020) about grey linear programming solving and applications. The review also helps clarify the important advantages, disadvantages and distinctions between different approaches and algorithms such as weakness of solving linear programming with grey numbers in constraints, inappropriate results with the lower bound is greater than upper bound, out of feasible region solutions and so on.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the energy audit reports in order to define the most favorable factors affecting energy consumption of buildings. Since energy audit of buildings includes assessment of occupants comfort level in addition to the technical data of buildings so some rules are extracted to model the employees thermal comfort level in organization.

Some tools of RST and GIA are used in this research to analyze the energy consumption of official buildings. “Average energy consumption of building per year” is selected as a system characteristic in GIA and as a decision attribute in RST to show the behavior of buildings energy consumption. Ten technical sequences of buildings are chosen as relevant factors of behavior and conditional attributes in GIA and RST. In order to model the employees thermal comfort level in organization by RST, ten technical attributes of buildings are selected as condition attributes and thermal comfort level of employees is selected as decision attribute. Due to the different algorithms of data complement, discretization, reduction, and rule generation, four rule models are constructed. Cross-validation is used for evaluation of the model results and the best model is chosen with 62 rules and 99.8 percent of accuracy.

According to the results of GIA and RST, “Uncontrolled area of the building” has been diagnosed as the most important factor between other relevant factors/attributes and it has the greatest effect on energy consumption of building. Four rule models have been extracted from deferent decision tables in order to describe the thermal comfort level of employees in organization. The maximum number of rules relates to the conditional combination/GA model with 1263 rules and average accuracy of 99.7 percent and the minimum number relates to the conditional combination/Janson model with 62 rules and average accuracy of 99.8 percent.

The total observations for rule extraction is 81 and the results can be improved by further samples.

It shows that “Uncontrolled area of the building” is the most important factor/attribute to define the consumption of buildings and thermal comfort level of employees in organization.

One important assumption in the conventional cooperative game theory is that payoffs are assumed to be deterministic. In terms of the players’ cognitive ability of the realistic world, this is a very strict assumption. The classical game theory can find no way out when a particular game circumstance involves uncertainty, such as limited knowledge, small sample, and inadequate information, the payoff values of the game can only be described with interval grey numbers. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this study the concept of N-person grey games is proposed in which payoffs are represented with interval grey numbers opposed to the classical game theory. A straight forward solution methodology is submitted compatible to grey numbers. Then, a currency war between anonymous countries is handled and modeled as an N-Person grey game. A generic currency war scenario is developed to follow the proposed solution procedure thoroughly.

Based on the outcomes of this work, the authors can say that N-person grey game is an expansion of the classical N-person game under uncertain grey information and can be applied in more complex and uncertain environments, such as those seen in complicated currency warfare.

This study combines the grey system theory with the classic N-person game theory and sets up the N-person grey game with grey payoff functions. Based on the grey number operating methods, the grey linear programming algorithm is established to calculate and distribute benefits to the players. In this respect this study has the feature of being the pioneer in the N-person grey game area.