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The aim of this paper is to study the optimal pricing decision in a supply chain with a dual distribution channel in a centralized and decentralized decision-making systems and investigate the economic impact of retail services on pricing behaviors with respect to the power structures.

To reach the equilibrium behavior of decision-makers, two-stage optimization, the Stackelberg game and the Bertrand–Nash game have been used. Also, to explore the effect of environmental uncertainty on the behavior of decision-maker, demand functions are characterized as an uncertain price dependent, service dependent and channel dependent. Decision parameters are based on experts’ belief degree, in the sense of uncertainty theory initiated by Liu (2007).

Obtained results reveal that the retail services have a strategic role in the centralized supply chain and the decentralized supply chain with dominant manufacturer, while both the supply chain and the consumer suffer from higher environmental indeterminacy.

This study is based on possible scenarios of dual distribution system only. Further research is recommended to investigate the applicability of the authors framework in different distribution systems.

The study findings are believed to be valuable for supply chains and organizations about to make a strategic decision on price of their good/service.

The paper contributes to the scarce literature on Uncertainty Theory initiated by Liu (2007), and combination of it with Game Theory for pricing in distribution system of supply chains. The study also contributes by investigating impact of non-price competitive factor (level of service) on pricing strategy.

Foreign direct investment in the infrastructure (FDII) of developing countries has a history of at least four decades. Bullish demand for foreign infrastructure services in developing countries, in combination with unstable political environments, has buoyed attention in political risk management (PRM). Even so, research into PRM of FDII remains fragmented and unmapped. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the current body of knowledge in this area, uncover deficiencies and lay the foundation for further practical PRM research in FDII.

This paper offers a bibliometric-qualitative review of current literature on political risk in foreign infrastructure in developing countries. A 36-year period is identified, from 1983 to 2018. Publication year, area of focus, author(s), institution and country are classified and analyzed through the medium of social network analysis. The tools used are VOSviewer, CiteSpace and Gephi to analyze citation networks of 345 published papers. Out of 345 papers, 94 highly related studies were selected for further content analysis.

The study identified the research trends in related areas of PRM in infrastructure (e.g. PRM in international construction and foreign direct investment) by bibliometric analysis, which includes scattered researcher collaboration, wide-ranging and unfocused journal selection, unsystematic and discontinuous research themes. The specific research weakness in PRM in FDII is recognized by qualitative analysis from the perspective of PRM process, which reveals a lack of understanding of the impact of political risk factors, subjective risk estimations, lacking application of mature political risk database in FDII, combined with a shortage of complete and effective strategies for PRM in FDII in developing countries.

This paper is the first of its kind, providing a comprehensive benchmark survey of the research to date in PRM in foreign infrastructure investment in developing countries. It proposes a framework of future research agenda on PRM in FDII, including special issues on this topic, identification and assessment of political risk factors with objective methods, proposition of PRM strategies on FDII with proactive and active approaches, completing strategies of PRM with reactive strategies from the perspectives of whole life cycle of infrastructure projects, political risk factors and stakeholders. It also addressed the need to investigate the suitable literature databases for researching in this area.

The high probability of the occurrence of separation bubbles or shocks and early transition to turbulence on surfaces of airfoil makes it very difficult to design high-lift and high-speed Natural-Laminar-Flow (NLF) airfoil for high-altitude long-endurance unmanned air vehicles. To resolve this issue, a framework of uncertainty-based design optimization (UBDO) is developed based on an adjusted polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) method.

The γ ̄Re-θt transition model combined with the shear stress transport k-ω turbulence model is used to predict the laminar-turbulent transition. The particle swarm optimization algorithm and PCE are integrated to search for the optimal NLF airfoil. Using proposed UBDO framework, the aforementioned problem has been regularized to achieve the optimal airfoil with a tradeoff of aerodynamic performances under fully turbulent and free transition conditions. The tradeoff is to make sure its good performance when early transition to turbulence on surfaces of NLF airfoil happens.

The results indicate that UBDO of NLF airfoil considering Mach number and lift coefficient uncertainty under free transition condition shows a significant deterioration when complicated flight conditions lead to early transition to turbulence. Meanwhile, UBDO of NLF airfoil with a tradeoff of performances under both fully turbulent and free transition conditions holds robust and reliable aerodynamic performance under complicated flight conditions.

In this work, the authors build an effective uncertainty-based design framework based on an adjusted PCE method and apply the framework to design two high-performance NLF airfoils. One of the two NLF airfoils considers Mach number and lift coefficient uncertainty under free transition condition, and the other considers uncertainties both under fully turbulent and free transition conditions. The results show that robust design of NLF airfoil should simultaneously consider Mach number, lift coefficient (angle of attack) and transition location uncertainty.

The major aim of this study is to explore the mechanism through which conflict management behavior impacts job satisfaction and innovation performance, and to verify this relationship with the empirical analysis in the context of China.

A model of the relationship among conflict management behavior, job satisfaction and innovation performance was developed and empirically tested. Based on a survey composed of 333 questionnaires designed for Chinese employees, the authors examine the effects of conflict management behavior on job satisfaction and innovation performance in Chinese contexts.

Results show that integrating and compromising conflict management behaviors are positively related to job satisfaction; integrating conflict management behavior is positively related to innovation performance; and avoiding conflict management behavior is negatively related to innovation performance.

This study does not take the industry differences into consideration, though how to maintain job satisfaction and promote innovation might differ from one industry to another. This study only studied on the personal level, therefore future studies can be extended to the team level.

This paper offers some useful suggestions for business managers as well as employees to improve employees' job satisfaction and innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to apply a postcolonial perspective on the findings from ethnographic research in a multi-national corporation in Shanghai and shed light on the ways that western creativity narratives are deployed as a means to mobilise and transform workers into self-governing, obedient corporate subjects.

The research applied ethnographic approaches to understand how creativity narratives are enacted in cross-cultural settings.

Creativity discourses in China often provoke anxieties around national capacity, economic growth and indigenous innovation. Locally trained knowledge workers in China are often assessed as less creative than their western counterparts and the reason attributed to cultural, pedagogical and political differences. However, these factors are not static in China’s fluid economic landscape and neither do Chinese workers uniformly accept that they are less creative.

This paper sheds light on a previously unexamined aspect of dominant western creativity discourses, which may be useful in future work amongst practitioners in international business settings.

This paper aims to focus on the rise and decline of the Qing dynasty in Chinese history, and tries to explain the evolutionary phenomenon that when a dynasty became strong, it replaced the former established but deteriorating one, and then at the end of its development, it disappeared eventually by using interest models developed herein.

Systemic interest models are introduced to the study of Chinese history quantitatively. First, by briefly going over the history of Qing, the reasons for its rise and fall are analyzed qualitatively. Second, the concept of interest is generalized under some proper assumptions so that several interest models are established. At the end, intriguing conclusions are drawn by analyzing the numerical solutions of these interest models.

Comparing this paper's results of numerical solutions with the Qing's history, we can see that the stability of a country was essentially an external appearance of the conflict of interests between the ruling and ruled classes. Usually, the eventual social turbulence happened when the balance of interests deteriorated and was tilted excessively to one social class, and ended when the imbalance reached another state of equilibrium. Moreover, the stability of a country always appeared to be a cycle of “turbulence→peace→turbulence→ċ” which is similar to the evolutionary characteristics of general systems indicated by the systemic yoyo model. Furthermore, the cycle can be found in all the feudal dynasties throughout Chinese history.

The interest models presented in this article can be applied to the study of other social problems, such as corporation governance, the analysis of the national economic relationships, and others.

The concept of interest is generalized in this paper, and the relevant interest models provide good conclusions in our analysis of social and historical phenomena.

This study focuses on a specific method of meat production that involves carcass purchase and meat production by packing facilities with a novel two-stage model that simultaneously considers location-routing and inventory-production operating decisions. The considered problem aims to reduce variable and fixed transportation and production costs, inventory holding cost and the cost of opening cold storage facilities.

The proposed model encompasses a two-stage model consisting of a single-echelon and a three-echelon many-to-many network with deterministic demand. The proposed model is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model which was tested with the general algebraic modelling system (GAMS) software for a real-world case study in Iran. A sensitivity analysis was performed to examine the effect of retailers' holding capacity and supply capacity at carcass suppliers.

In this research, the number of products transferred at each level, the number of products held, the quantity of red meat produced, the required cold storage facilities and the required vehicles were optimally specified. The outcomes indicated a two percent (2%) decrease in cost per kg of red meat. Eventually, the outcomes of the first and second sensitivity analysis indicated that reduced retailers' holding capacity and supply capacity at carcass suppliers leads to higher total costs.

This research proposes a novel multi-period location-inventory-routing problem for the red meat supply chain in an emerging economy with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet and logistics decisions. The proposed model is presented in two stages and four-echelon including carcass suppliers, packing facilities, cold storage facilities and retailers.

This study aims to develop a mathematical programming model for preemptive multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problems in construction with the objective of levelling resources considering renewable and non-renewable resources.

The proposed model was solved by the exact method and the genetic algorithm integrated with the solution modification procedure coded with MATLAB software. The Taguchi method was applied for setting the parameters of the genetic algorithm. Different numerical examples were used to show the validation of the proposed model and the capability of the genetic algorithm in solving large-sized problems. In addition, the sensitivity analysis of two parameters, including resource factor and order strength, was conducted to investigate their impact on computational time.

The results showed that preemptive activities obtained better results than non-preemptive activities. In addition, the validity of the genetic algorithm was evaluated by comparing its solutions to the ones of the exact methods. Although the exact method could not find the optimal solution for large-scale problems, the genetic algorithm obtained close to optimal solutions within a short computational time. Moreover, the findings demonstrated that the genetic algorithm was capable of achieving optimal solutions for small-sized problems. The proposed model assists construction project practitioners with developing a realistic project schedule to better estimate the project completion time and minimize fluctuations in resource usage during the entire project horizon.

There has been no study considering the interruption of multi-mode activities with fluctuations in resource usage over an entire project horizon. In this regard, fluctuations in resource consumption are an important issue that needs the attention of project planners.

In this paper, multi-period location–inventory–routing problem (LIRP) considering different vehicles with various capacities has been investigated for the supply chain of red meat. The purpose of this paper is to reduce variable and fixed costs of transportation and production, holding costs of red meat, costs of meeting livestock needs and refrigerator rents.

The considered supply chain network includes five echelons. Demand considered for each customer is approximated as deterministic using historical data. The modeling is performed on a real case. The presented model is a linear mixed-integer programming model. The considered model is solved using general algebraic modeling system (GAMS) software for data set of the real case.

A real-world case is solved using the proposed method. The obtained results have shown a reduction of 4.20 per cent in final price of red meat. Also, it was observed that if the time periods changed from month to week, the final cost of meat per kilogram would increase by 43.26 per cent.

This paper presents a five-echelon LIRP for the meat supply chain in which vehicles are considered heterogeneous. To evaluate the capability of the presented model, a real case is solved in Iran and its results are compared with the real conditions of a firm, and the rate of improvement is presented. Finally, the impact of the changed time period on the results of the solution is examined.

Recently, China has been paying increasing attention to how to improve the efficiency of the marine environment and realize a green and sustainable development of the marine economy. Consequently, the industrial structure is crucial to improving efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to introduce environmental factors into the efficiency analysis framework and explore the relationship between marine industrial structure and marine environmental efficiency.

This paper uses marine economic data under the DEA-BBC model to measure the marine environmental efficiency of provinces and cities and classifies them by cluster analysis. Then, the marine industrial structure and marine environmental efficiency are studied by an econometric model with human capital, ownership structure, land economic development level, scientific research input and government intervention degree as control variables.

The overall level of marine environmental efficiency is relatively low in China, increasing and then decreasing over the research period. The rationalization of industrial structure and scientific research input have significant promoting effects on marine environmental efficiency, while the degree of government intervention has a significant inhibiting effect. The positive effect of human capital on efficiency depends on whether it can be successfully converted into productivity. The effects of industrial structure advancement, ownership structure and land economic development level of on the marine environmental efficiency are mixed.

The results provide a theoretical and decision-making basis for China to transform and upgrade its marine industrial structure and sustainably develop the marine economy.