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The cognitive composition process of attribute information plays a critical role in heuristic aspects of consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions. This study examines the effects of attribute information order and attribute information amount on consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions under the premise of consumers’ limited information processing capacity. An experiment with two separate designs is conducted for testing the different hypotheses. The results support the hypothesis that consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions are influenced by the amount of attribute information received/processed. The attribute information order is found to affect not only the outcomes of consumer decisions but also the amount of attribute information processed. These findings further suggest that consumers may be more inclined to adopt strategies of a noncompensatory heuristic nature when making multiattribute preferential decisions.

The author establishes a point of criticism against various positions regarding technology, especially the proposal of De Kerckhove on the role of social networks in life.

To that end the present text has four sections. The first presents a way to study society from the point of view of its symbolic production, understood as an inseparable whole. Second, this symbolic dimension of all human society, is differentiated in three inseparable components: information, communication, and knowledge. Third, having established these analytical differentiations, the text underlines the importance of the systemic relationship between internal brain and extra-cortical formations or “external” brain, to understand the human complex relations with technology. Finally, the text presents the Cultural Fronts approach as a theoretical and methodological tool for the study of the social production of hegemony and subalternity on scales of everyday life. The methodological fecundity of this category has been proven in a variety of field studies since 1982 and is the basis of the perspective of action research that the author calls “cybercultur@,” understood as the collective development of intelligent self-determination capabilities confronting concrete social problems.

The changing articulation of citizenship is traced, both in relation to the national and the global. Conceiving of citizenship as an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen, and locating her inquiry at that point of incompleteness, the author opens up the discussion to the making of the political. The central thesis is that the incompleteness of the formal institution of citizenship makes it possible for the outsider to claim for expanded inclusions. It is the outsider, whether a minoritized citizen or an immigrant, who has kept changing the institution across time and space. Times of unsettlement make this particularly visible. The current period of globalization is one such period, even though this is a partial unsettlement. New types of political actors are taking shape, changing the relationship between the state and the individual, and remaking the political.

Cross-docking is a supply chain distribution and logistics strategy for which less-than-truckload shipments are consolidated into full-truckload shipments. Goods are stored up to a maximum of 24 hours in a cross-docking terminal. In this chapter, we build on the literature review by Ladier and Alpan (2016), who reviewed cross-docking research and conducted interviews with cross-docking managers to find research gaps and provide recommendations for future research. We conduct a systematic literature review, following the framework by Ladier and Alpan (2016), on cross-docking literature from 2015 up to 2020. We focus on papers that consider the intersection of research and industry, e.g., case studies or studies presenting real-world data. We investigate whether the research has changed according to the recommendations of Ladier and Alpan (2016). Additionally, we examine the adoption of Industry 4.0 practices in cross-docking research, e.g., related to features of the physical internet, the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in cross-docking methodologies or case studies. We conclude that only small adaptations have been done based on the recommendations of Ladier and Alpan (2016), but we see growing attention for Industry 4.0 concepts in cross-docking, especially for physical internet hubs.

This chapter proposes a hybrid heuristic method combining a clustering search (CS) metaheuristic with an exact algorithm to solve a two-stage capacitated facility location problem (TSCFLP). The TSCFLP consists of defining the optimal locations of plants and depots and the product flow from plants to depots (first stage) and from depots to customers (second stage). The problem deals commonly with cargo transportation in which products must be transported from a set of plants to meet customers’ demands passing out by intermediate depots. The main decisions to be made are related to define which plants and depots must be opened from a given set of potential locations, which customer to assign to each one of the opened depots, and the amount of product flow from the plants to the depots and from the depots to the customers. The objective is to minimize costs satisfying demand and capacity constraints. Computational results demonstrate that our method was able to find good solutions when comparing it directly with a commercial solver and a genetic algorithm (GA) reported in a recent chapter found in the literature, requiring less than 1.5% and 41% of the computational time performed by these methods, respectively. Thus, our hybrid method combining CS with an exact algorithm can be considered as a new matheuristic to solve the TSCFLP.

This chapter discusses a collaborative strategy for noncompetitive small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME's) aiming to reduce their logistics costs by means of a joint replenishment of multiple items. The proposed approach is an extension of the classical joint replenishment problem, named as a Stochastic Collaborative Joint Replenishment problem (S-CJRP) because it considers stochastic demand, warehouse and transport capacity constraints, and multiple buyers and vendors. Operating this method implies three main challenges: (1) determining the frequency with which each buyer should replenish the products; (2) allocating investments and benefits between partnering buyers; and (3) deciding whether to coordinate the supply chain internally or outsource its coordination. The S-CJRP is solved through a heuristic approach, which deals with uses of the Shapley Value Function to allocate the investments and benefits, and it explores the coordination through several simulation scenarios, all of which exhibit prospective cost reductions in inventory management. Preliminary results show that third-party logistics providers could be a valuable resource in coordinating SMEs along a supply chain.

In this paper, we consider the disassembly-to-order (DTO) problem, where a variety of returned products are disassembled to fulfill the demand for specified numbers of components and materials. The objective is to determine the optimal numbers of returned products to disassemble so as to maximize profit and minimize costs. We model the DTO problem using a multi-criteria decision-making approach. Since the conditions of returned products are unknown, the yields from disassembly are considered to be stochastic. To solve the stochastic problem, we use one of the two heuristic approaches (viz., one-to-one approach or one-to-many approach) that converts the problem into a deterministic equivalent. We compare the performance of the two heuristic approaches using a case example.

The question facing sociology is whether it is a field or a discipline. If it is a field, then there is no need for theorizing. However, if sociology is a discipline, then problem-solving cannot be disentangled from theorizing without a loss of intelligibility – the inability to explain the social as the concept of the discipline. Through the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity, this chapter presents cognitive sociology as a paradigm appropriate to the concept of the social understood as an ongoing course of activity. In doing so, it is shown how bounded rationality and expertise play a crucial role in how communication interacts with the division of cognitive labor, especially through the idea of representational representationality. Representational representationality is an idea that reveals how the degree of clarity among language, meaning, and thought is relative to the issues of audience and ignorance. Representational representationality is significant because it demonstrates how the relationship among meaning, language, and thought is subject to communicative errors – errors arising from a predicament of intelligibility and not merely arising from issues of computational skill, as described by Herbert Simon's model of bounded rationality and expertise in human problem-solving. The argument that follows from this shows how the means for adapting to ambiguity amounts to the difference between Simon's model and a quasi-real model in terms of its principle of rationality, principle of efficiency, and its cognitive style of problem-solving for deliberate practice. These dimensions are shown to effect what “examples” are good for in the problem-solving process, thereby revealing the politics of expertise. The politics of expertise demonstrates how the conflicts in sociological explanations of strategy are not merely conflicts that can be set aside as a pluralism of values. Rather, the conflicting explanations of theory and theorizing can only be resolved when the situational rationality of sociology as a discipline realizes the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity.