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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal production and financing strategies for the closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) composed of a capital-constrained original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and a risk-averse authorized remanufacturer (RM).

The authors formulate four models with different scenarios, namely, the OEM has sufficient capital; the OEM has limited capital without financing; the OEM adopts debt financing strategy; and the OEM adopts equity financing strategy. The equilibrium solutions of each scenario are obtained by backward induction method, the influences of risk aversion coefficient on the equilibrium solutions are examined and the OEM's optimal financing strategy is found by comparison analysis.

When the OEM's initial capital is limited and the equity dividend ratio is less than a certain threshold, the equity financing strategy is more advantageous for the OEM. However, if the OEM's initial capital is extremely scarce and the dividend proportion is large, the OEM prefers the debt financing strategy. When considering financing, consumer surplus always decreases as the risk aversion factor increases; the debt financing strategy is more environmentally friendly compared with the equity financing strategy. Only the debt financing strategy can make both members in the CLSC achieve a win-win situation in a certain region when the dividend ratio is sufficiently large.

It will be more fascinating if the model extends to such a case that the production operation situation in the CLSC composed of multiple OEMs in multiple periods. Furthermore, the remanufacturer's risk-averse information is asymmetry may be more realistic in our daily life.

There are three main differences from the existing research. One is that the remanufacturer's risk aversion originates from the uncertain remanufacturing cost instead of the uncertain market demand. Another is that the boundary conditions of the OEM prefer to adopt debt financing is obtained through the envelope theorem with Lagrange multiplier method. Last but not the least, this paper provides a good theoretical reference and practical guidance for the OEM to make the rational financing strategy selection in face of different degree of capital scarcity in the CLSC system. The value of the three aspects provides a theoretical basis for the optimal operation decisions of capital-constrained manufacturer considering the remanufacturer's risk aversion in the CLSC operation system.

This study aims to investigate the effects and implications of overconfidence in a competitive game involving multiple newsvendors. This study explores how overconfidence influences system coordination, optimal stocking strategies and competition among newsvendors in the context of the well-known newsvendor stocking problem.

The study applies robust optimization theory and the absolute regret minimization criterion to analyze the competitive game of overconfident newsvendors. This study considers the asymmetric information held by newsvendors regarding market demand and obtains a closed-form solution for the competing game. The effects of overconfidence on system coordination and optimal stocking strategies are examined.

The results of the study indicate that overconfidence can act as a positive force in reducing the effects of overstocking caused by competition and asymmetric information among newsvendors. The analysis reveals that there exists an optimal level of overconfidence that coordinates the ordering system of multiple overconfident newsvendors, leading to first-best outcomes under certain conditions. Additionally, numerical examples confirm the obtained results. Furthermore, considering newsvendors' expected profit, the study finds that a higher degree of overconfidence does not necessarily result in lower actual expected profit.

Despite the significant contributions of this study to theoretical and managerial insights, this study does have certain limitations. First, in the establishment of the belief demand function, the substitution ratio, which quantifies the transfer, is assumed to be an exogenous variable. However, in reality, this is often influenced by factors such as the price of goods and the distance between stores. Therefore, one direction worth studying in the future is to explore the uncertainty associated with the demand substitution ratio and integrate that as an endogenous variable into the optimization model. Second, this study does not address the type of product and solely focuses on quantitatively analyzing the effect of salvage value on the optimal stocking strategy. Future studies can explore the effect of degree of perishability and selling period of the product on the stocking. Third, the focus of uncertainty in this study revolves around market demand, and the implications of this uncertainty are significant. A recent study (Rahbari et al., 2023) addressed an innovative robust optimization problem related to canned foods during pandemic crises. The recent study's findings highlighted the effectiveness of expanding canned food exports to neighboring countries with economic justification as the best strategy for companies amidst the disruptions caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Incorporating the issue of disruptions into the authors' research would be interesting and challenging.

From a managerial perspective, the authors' study provides a research paradigm for game-theoretic inventory problems in scenarios where the market demand distribution is unknown. While most inventory problems are analyzed and solved based on expectation-based optimization criteria, which rely on an accurate distribution of market demand, obtaining this information in practice can often be challenging or expensive for decision-makers. Consequently, a discrepancy arises between real-world observations and theoretical identifications. This study aimed to complement previous research and address the inconsistency between observations and theoretical identification.

The authors' research contributes to the existing understanding of overconfidence and assists individuals in making appropriate stocking strategies based on the individuals' level of overconfidence. Diverging significantly from the traditional view of overconfidence as a negative bias, the authors' results show the view's potential positive impact within a competitive environment, resulting in greater actual expected profits for newsvendors.

This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the effects of overconfidence in a competitive game of newsvendors. This study extends the analysis of the well-known newsvendor stocking problem by incorporating overconfidence and considering the implications for system coordination and competition. The application of robust optimization theory and the absolute regret minimization criterion provides a novel approach to studying overconfidence in this context.

The coal-fired power plants have been confronted with new operation challenge since the unified carbon trading market was launched in China. To make the optimal decision for the carbon emissions and power production has already been an important subject for the plants. Most of the previous studies only considered the market prices of electricity and coal to optimize the generation plan. However, with the opening of the carbon trading market, carbon emission has become a restrictive factor for power generation. By introducing the carbon-reduction target in the production decision, this study aims to achieve both the environmental and economic benefits for the coal-fired power plants to positively deal with the operational pressure.

A dynamic optimization approach with both long- and short-term decisions was proposed in this study to control the carbon emissions and power production. First, the operation rules of carbon, electricity and coal markets are analyzed, and a two-step decision-making algorithm for annual and weekly production is presented. Second, a production profit model based on engineering constraints is established, and a greedy heuristics algorithm is applied in the Gurobi solver to obtain the amounts of weekly carbon emission, power generation and coal purchasing. Finally, an example analysis is carried out with five generators of a coal-fired power plant for illustration.

The results show that the joint information of the multiple markets of carbon, electricity and coal determines the real profitability of power production, which can assist the plants to optimize their production and increase the profits. The case analyses demonstrate that the carbon emission is reduced by 2.89% according to the authors’ method, while the annual profit is improved by 1.55%.

As an important power producer and high carbon emitter, coal-fired power plants should actively participate in the carbon market. Rather than trade blindly at the end of the agreement period, they should deeply associate the prices of carbon, electricity and coal together and realize optimal management of carbon emission and production decision efficiently.

This paper offers an effective method for the coal-fired power plant, which is struggling to survive, to manage its carbon emission and power production optimally.

Innovation during project delivery is contested space. The aim in this research is to empirically explore the theory of this contested space and how project implementation can be optimized by the contractor to deliver better outcomes. It is hypothesized that project innovation has a proportional and measurable relationship to contractor success.

Based on a novel conceptual framework, this research applies a case study methodology to analyse 31 construction projects undertaken by a single Australian middle-tier contractor. Benefits from innovation are not often equitably shared. There are risks and rewards. The project innovation zone is defined as a combination of three key performance indicators – efficacy, efficiency and margin – merged into a single index that most likely shows evidence of “working smarter”.

Client–contractor project innovation (c2pi) is demonstrated to be strongly correlated with head contractor success (HCS), yielding an r² value of 71%. Innovative projects mostly show positive change in efficacy, efficiency and margin when comparing “planned” and “actual” outcomes. Across the cases studied, 35% demonstrated likely evidence of innovative delivery and 52% demonstrated evidence of success from the construction contractor's perspective.

These findings verify that, within the studied sample, the pursuit of innovation leads to projects that are likely to also have greater success for the head contractor, evidenced by the mix of five critical success factors: finishing on schedule, making profit, and having less defects, less accidents and higher quality workmanship. These outcomes arguably also apply to sub-contractors, where the head contractor assumes the role of “client”.

This paper aims to study the role of absorptive capacities in coopetitive alliances that involve leakages of sensitive private knowledge regarding firms’ production processes.

This paper uses a game theoretic approach to model a differentiated product market in which two firms asymmetrically informed about the economic value of a business opportunity must cooperate to exploit this opportunity. Under coopetition, firms gain access to their partners’ core knowledge as the result of inevitable leakages of information. Firms differ in their absorptive capacities, which affects their abilities to leverage this new knowledge outside the collaborative activity.

Firms with superior absorptive capacities are more likely to devise alliances whose purpose is to gain access to their partners’ core knowledge. This opportunistic behaviour does not disappear even if firms compensate their partners for the damages caused by this deceptive business practice. This paper also finds that a highly specialised product safeguards firms with limited absorptive capacities against these opportunistic behaviours.

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the role that absorptive capacities and product specialisation play in influencing the emergence of opportunistic behaviours in coopetitive alliances. The theoretical analysis underscores the extent to which the risk of opportunism associated with the exploitation of a partner’s specific core knowledge outside the scope of the cooperative activity affects not only the nature and intensity of market competition but also the incentives to pursue coopetitive alliances.

This study aims to develop a Stackelberg Game Model for seeking the optimal subsidy plans with varying levels of government financial capability (GFC). Furthermore, the scenario-based analysis is conducted and will enable governments to identify a comprehensive subsidy plan as follows: improve project performance and optimise social welfare.

A Stackelberg Game Model is developed to optimise the effectiveness of subsidies on the performance of public-private partnerships (PPPs).

According to the scenarios that are generated from the model, governments that are confronting with limited public budgets could reduce the intensity of performance incentives and increase the participation-oriented subsidy. Whilst a participation-oriented subsidy can stimulate private organisations’ willingness to participate in infrastructure PPPs, a performance-oriented subsidy is capable of facilitating the projects’ performances. Intuitively, the performance-oriented subsidy enables the private entities of PPPs to improve their efforts on the projects to realise higher profits. However, the participation-oriented subsidy is unable to affect the level of their effort spent on the projects. To satisfy both parties’ expectations in a PPP, the performance-oriented subsidy needs to be prioritised for a purpose of enabling higher quality outputs.

The game model developed in this study contributes to the literature by offering new insight into the underlying mechanism of governments and private entities, in terms of their decision-making for subsidy planning and contributions (i.e. resource allocation and spending) during the life-cycle of PPPs. This research enriches the government subsidy model by revealing the effects of the GFC and clarifies the impacts of two different schemes of subsidy on the performance of PPPs.

The government has been conventionally viewed as being omnipotent to provide PPPs with a wide range of subsidies. However, the subsidies are not unlimited, due to GFC. In addressing this void, this study has modelled the impacts of government subsidy plans with a consideration of GFC-related constraints. The combined effects of the participation- and performance-oriented subsidies on the project performance of PPPs have been examined.

This paper analytically models and numerically investigates two operating levers, namely optimization of product price and optimization of product quality in the context of a manufacturer that sells the products directly in the marketplace. The study attempts to identify how optimizing product quality and product price can fulfill a manufacturer's economic aims such as maximization of the manufacturer's profit and market demand. Anchored to the extant literature, the demand is modeled as a parametric joint multiplicative function of price and quality. Further, price is modeled as a function of product quality.

First, the authors evolve the analytical expression for the manufacturer's profit. Thereafter, following the mathematical principles of unconstrained optimization, the authors arrive at the conditions for optimal product quality and product price. The authors further perform numerical experiments to understand the behavior of economic dimensions such as profit and demand with respect to sensitivities associated with cost, quality and price.

The authors find that under product quality optimization, the optimal product quality is a unique solution in that a highest possible theoretical manufacturer's profit is obtained. However, in the case of product price optimization, the optimal product price is non-unique and is a function of product quality. The authors further find that in the context of functional quality-level expectations, product quality optimization as an operating lever gives a better dividend. However, in the case of higher product quality expectations, product price optimization performs better than product quality optimization. Further, several novel findings are also obtained from numerical experimentations.

The findings of the authors' study have implications for types of industries characterized by relatively low as well as relatively high competitive intensity. Further, as opposed to several extant studies that have often carried out joint optimization of quality and price, the authors' study is one of the first to study the impact of product price and product quality on the manufacturer's economic objective in a disparate and focused manner, thus capturing individual effects.

To answer the questions: what roles windows of opportunity act in the catchup process of latecomers, what strategies latecomer enterprises should adopt to size windows of opportunity to catch-up with incumbents even going beyond?

This paper studies the catch-up history of the Chinese mobile phone industry and proposes a sectoral innovation system under scenario of technology paradigm shifts. Then a history-friendly simulation model and counterfactual analysis are conducted to learn how different windows of opportunity and catch-up strategies influence the catch-up performance of latecomers.

Results show latecomers can catch up with technology ability by utilizing technology window and path-creating strategy. However, catching up with the market is not guaranteed. Demand window can help latecomers to catch up with market as it increases their survival rates, different sized windows benefit different strategies. However, it also enlarges incumbents' scale effect. Without technology window technology catch up is not guaranteed. Two windows have combination effects. Demand window affects the “degree” of change in survival rates, while the technology window affects the “speed” of change. Demand window provides security; technology window provides the possibility of a breakthrough for technology ability.

The findings of this paper provide theoretical guidance for latecomer enterprises to choose appropriate catch-up strategies to seize different opportunity windows.

This paper emphasizes the abrupt change of industrial innovation system caused by technology paradigm shifts, which makes up for the shortcomings of previous researches on industrial innovation system which either studied the influence of static factors or based on the influence of continuous changes.

As an important form of the e-commerce industry, online group buying is under the spotlight from with two sides: cheaper price but longer waiting time. The purpose of this paper is to adequately investigate the interaction between saving and waiting time of group buying comprehensively.

To fill the research gap, the authors elaborate a dual-channel supply chain (SC) with regular retail (individual buying) and group-buying channel, and formulate the demand based on the consumer utility with the positive effect of saving money and the negative effect of wasting time.

The authors find that power structure only changes the optimal prices, instead of the waiting time. The selling price mainly influences consumer demands, instead of the price discount of group buying. The SC profits are only positive to the channel preference, and it is the decisive parameter of consumers' choice. The price sensitivity lays a more remarkable impact on the SC compared to the time sensitivity. Above all, the price is the main factor of group buying, instead of time.

These results underscore the improvement for the dual-channel SC of group buying, providing managerial insights for the group-buying industry.

Fairness concerns in the supply chain management have recently caught much attention in the OM research community. The combined effect of fairness and competition on supply chain coordination and the interplay between them, however, have yet to be thoroughly examined.

The authors study a multiplayer supply chain with one supplier and two competing retailers with fairness concerns by a three-player Stackelberg game model. This theoretical study provides equilibrium solutions under different ranges of fairness and competition combinations. Besides theoretical analysis, the authors also conduct standard economic experiments and estimate structural parameters using experimental data.

The authors find that a simple wholesale price can coordinate the whole supply chain with certain conditions of fairness and competition. Moreover, although fairness concerns always decrease the wholesale price and increase retailers' profit share, downstream competition weakens such effects and decreases downstream players' market share. The experiments confirm the existence of fairness concerns and the interaction of competition and fairness, as shown in the theoretical analysis.

A more comprehensive model with both distributional and peer-induced fairness considered could generate better insights in the interactive impact of competition and fairness. Moreover, the authors followed the previous channel competition literature and modeled the demand with linear demand function which makes the game decisions trackable in closed form solution. A more general demand function could result in different solutions and thus new insights.

The authors’ work provides a comprehensive theoretical study of the interaction between fairness concerns and competition and clarifies the in-depth connection between the effects of competition and fairness concerns in the literature.