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This paper aims to study the impact of existence and lack of discount on the relationships between one manufacturer and one retailer under the cooperative and the non-cooperative games and the members’ profits are compared.

In the first approach, the manufacturer’s price function is constant, and in the second approach, this price function is a decreasing function with respect to lot size. These approaches are modeled through three games structure, including two Stackelberg games and one cooperative game.

Some numerical instances comprising sensitivity analysis are provided, and then the members’ profits in different scenarios are compared. This paper reveals that in the presented models, whether the members are inclined to change their profits.

This paper presents a tool of decision-making for the type of relationships of members in two different circumstances, and an approach is also presented to maximize the members’ profit.

In this paper, the relationships between one manufacturer and one retailer are studied under six different circumstances, where pricing, cooperative advertising and inventory cost are considered simultaneously. Also, a different model is presented to make a balance in individual profits and gain more profit for each member compared to the cooperative and non-cooperative game.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

There is need for a new, more precise, more integrated system for logistics costing. The integration of purchasing, transportation (traffic) and storage operations throughout the vertical stream, from source of materials to the consumer is discouragingly complex. It cannot be accomplished by departmentalising logistics functions, performing average and joint commodity costing, and dealing primarily with direct costs. The volume of records may be representative, but there is a very apparent lack of costing systems to facilitate logistics planning. The volume of shipment is the key to logistics cost analysis, just as volume of production is the independent variable in conventional economic analysis. Logistics costs vary with changes in the volume of shipment. Cost per hundredweight is the unit for cost analysis under the Cellular Flow Planning System. It is measured on a specific commodity, between specific points. Purchase price, transport rate, linear increasing costs, constant and single payment decreasing costs are the five classes of costs used to compare competitive volumes of shipment. All significant logistics costs can be so classified. This article presents only the rationale behind the unit for cost measurement, the classification of costs, and the means of comparison.

The ideals of total quality view contradicts with the traditional prevention‐appraisal‐failure (PAF) model. The PAF model, based on the “higher quality‐higher cost” notion, fails to explain the “higher quality‐lower cost” premise of total quality. The purpose of this study is to examine the behaviour of quality costs and investigate the two contradicting views.

Based on the literature, a generic descriptive model is developed to examine the dynamics of quality costs and quality level over time. Through illustrative examples, the behaviour of quality costs is demonstrated and relevant implications are highlighted.

The proposed model supports continuous improvement regardless of the effectiveness of the firm's quality improvement programs. When the quality improvement program is highly effective, the “higher quality‐lower cost” phenomenon is observed; whereas, in a less effective quality improvement program, the authors observe the “higher quality‐higher cost” phenomenon, which still calls for increased improvement effort necessary for quality sustainability.

The proposed model explains well the dynamics of quality costs, however, it can be further enhanced by incorporating the dynamics of the effectiveness of the firm's quality improvement program and its relation to quality level and quality costs.

The proposed model is a useful tool especially for quality improvement planning and budgeting decisions.

Balancing between the two contradictory views of quality costs, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship of quality costs and quality level.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical economic replacement decision model to identify the economic lifetime of the ventilation system used by Trafikverket in its Stockholm tunnels.

The proposed data-driven optimisation model considers operating and maintenance costs, purchase price and system resale value for a ventilation system consisting of 121 fans. The study identified data quality problems in Trafikverket’s MAXIMO database.

It is found that the absolute economic replacement time (ERT) of the ventilation system is 108 months but for a range of 100–120 months, the total cost remains almost constant. Sensitivity and regression analysis showed that the operating cost has the largest impact on the ERT.

The results are promising; the company has the possibility of significantly reducing the LCC of the ventilation system by optimising its lifetime. In addition, the proposed model can be used for other systems with repairable components, making it applicable, useful and implementable within Trafikverket more generally.

The concept of zero inventory (ZI) is a powerful tool to improve production economics. The major factor in ZI is set‐up cost reduction. Examines what will happen when set‐up costs are stationarily and non‐stationarily reduced by mathematical presentations and simulation. The results are useful for real practice. Zangwill observes that reducing set‐up costs need not decrease inventory by a special example of non‐stationary cases. Likewise, set‐up cost reduction need not decrease total production and inventory costs. By using simulation, obtains results contrary to Zangwill. Most presentations of set‐up cost reduction consider the stationary case. It is hard to find the degree of cost variations by mathematical models. Thus uses a mathematical approach and a few simulation results that varying set‐up costs are provided. Reduces set‐up costs stationarily and non‐stationarily to examine the effects on total costs and total holding costs.

Throughout the 1990s, the supply of new condominiums in Tokyo significantly increased while prices persistently fell. This article investigates whether the market power of condominium developers is a factor in explaining the outcome in this market and whether there is a relationship between production cost trend and the degree of market power that the developers were able to exercise. In order to respond to these questions, we construct and structurally estimate a dynamic durable goods oligopoly model of the condominium market – one incorporating time-variant costs and a secondary market – using a nested GMM procedure. We find that the data provide no evidence that firms in the primary market have substantial market power in this industry. Moreover, the counterfactual experiment provides evidence that inflationary and deflationary expectations on production cost trends have asymmetric effects to the market power of condominium producers. The increase in their markup when cost inflation is anticipated is significantly higher than the decrease in the markup when the same magnitude of cost deflation is anticipated.

The purpose of this paper is to test the political costs hypothesis in emerging economies characterized by interventionist governments and weak protection of property rights. The paper uses executives’ political connection and state control to measure firms’ political costs.

Based on a sample of Tunisian firms, univariate and multivariate analyses are used to test whether firms’ political costs have any impact on earnings management.

The empirical analysis indicates that the executives’ political connection is not directly related to earnings management. However, the interaction between executives’ political connection and the state control affects the firm’s sensitivity to political pressure and its earnings management practices. More specifically, this study provides evidence that non-connected firms and state-controlled firms attempt to use accounting policies to decrease their earnings especially during periods of the former government when they had to face high political costs. This finding is robust to comparing means of political cost indicators between different groups. Indeed, private firms with political connection enjoy a significantly lower insurance right, tax and donations and grants compared to other firms.

This study provides empirical evidence for the specific application of accounting theory in emerging economies.

Political influence may be an important criterion that will be used by auditors and investors to appreciate and detect specific manipulations of accounting earnings. Similarly, regulators should be aware of the political factors effect on discretionary behavior of managers to provide appropriate rules and standards.

The study is a pioneer in proving that a firm’s size is not always a suitable measure of its political cost. It extends the accounting literature on the role of political economy in the application of the political costs hypothesis. This hypothesis is confirmed in emerging economies by providing new and significantly measure of firms’ political costs

Student failure in tertiary education costs taxpayers and donors large sums each year. The cost of quality can be substantial, but it can also be a source of significant savings. This study attempts to provide a framework in terms of which these costs can be quantified through the application of the principles of quality costing in tertiary education. An emphasis on quality increases profitability by increasing student throughput and by decreasing the cost of the provision of services. Significant savings are possible if the educational system could achieve greater success by focusing on adding value to those students that are more likely to succeed. If quality costing is made visible in the South African tertiary education system, it could have a profound impact on the products (students) that are delivered to society.

A broad product assortment is usually valued highly by customers. However, holding a great number of product variants in inventory increases the costs of a supplier. It is possible to reduce need for warehousing with direct deliveries from manufacturing units, but customer value is reduced when orders are received on several shipments. Merge‐in‐transit is a distribution method in which goods shipped from several supply locations are consolidated into one final customer delivery while they are in transit. This article examines the effects of merge‐in‐transit distribution on delivery costs. The analysis is performed with a maintenance, repair, and operations products distributor as the case company. The evidence in this article supports the claim of merge‐in‐transit being a cost efficient distribution alternative in business networks. Based on the results advocates that companies in multi‐company networks should study the possibility of using the merge‐in‐transit delivery model.