MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"On the Sum-of-Squares algorithm for bin packing","authors":"J. Csirik, David S. Johnson, Claire Mathieu, J. Orlin, P. Shor, R. Weber","doi":"10.1145/1120582.1120583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/1120582.1120583","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we present a theoretical analysis of the online <i>Sum-of-Squares</i> algorithm (<i>SS</i>) for bin packing along with several new variants. <i>SS</i> is applicable to any instance of bin packing in which the bin capacity <i>B</i> and item sizes <i>s</i>(<i>a</i>) are integral (or can be scaled to be so), and runs in time <i>O</i>(<i>nB</i>). It performs remarkably well from an average case point of view: For any discrete distribution in which the optimal expected waste is sublinear, <i>SS</i> also has sublinear expected waste. For any discrete distribution where the optimal expected waste is bounded, <i>SS</i> has expected waste at most <i>O</i>(log <i>n</i>). We also discuss several interesting variants on <i>SS</i>, including a randomized <i>O</i>(<i>nB</i> log <i>B</i>)-time online algorithm <i>SS</i>* whose expected behavior is essentially optimal for all discrete distributions. Algorithm <i>SS</i>* depends on a new linear-programming-based pseudopolynomial-time algorithm for solving the NP-hard problem of determining, given a discrete distribution <i>F</i>, just what is the growth rate for the optimal expected waste.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114475347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Part Time Partner Redux: So We Solved the Problem, Didn't We?","authors":"Thomas A. Kochan","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.511242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.511242","url":null,"abstract":"A teaching case on the reality of part time policies for associates and partners in law firms. This case shows that formal policies have failed to overcome the informal norms or culture that penalized professionals for deviating from what was engrained in the minds of senior partners and others in the profession as the \"ideal worker.\" It asks the reader to develop a strategy, considering the different stakeholders, to solve this problem.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126661169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Has the Consumer Harm Standard Lost its Teeth?","authors":"Howard H. Chang, David S. Evans, R. Schmalensee","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.332021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.332021","url":null,"abstract":"There appears to be universal agreement that antitrust policy should \"protect competition, not competitors\" and that consumer welfare is the fundamental standard for evaluating competitive effects. There is considerable debate, however, about how to implement those principles in practice when evaluating rule-of-reason antitrust claims under the Sherman Act. The choice of an appropriate consumer harm necessarily involves a tradeoff between the risk of being so lenient that firms think they can get away with anticompetitive behavior and the risk of being so strict that the courts condemn practices that help consumers and thereby stifle the very competitive process the antitrust laws seek to protect. There is no way to eliminate both risks, and the courts and ultimately society need to choose how to minimize the expected costs of the inevitable errors. The Clinton Administration, in cases brought against Intel, Microsoft, and Visa/MasterCard, asked the courts to use a consumer harm standard that relied on an inference of harm to consumers from harm to competitors. In the two cases that went to trial and for which there is a complete record U.S. v. Microsoft and U.S. v. Visa U.S.A. et al. the district court accepted this approach. We explore two important issues in inferring consumer harm from competitor harm. The first is what preconditions must hold for it to be valid to make this inference. We show in this paper that courts in both Microsoft and Visa did not require Clinton Administration antitrust enforcers to establish critical preconditions. The second important issue is whether a showing of substantial harm to consumers should be required for liability. The courts can reduce errors by requiring evidence that the challenged practices have caused, or are likely to cause, substantial harm to consumers. The Microsoft and Visa cases both demonstrate that this is a realistic evidentiary hurdle that could have been required of the plaintiffs. There were many studies plaintiffs could have done to demonstrate significant effects on consumers if in fact there were such effects.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121474596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"All Mixed Strategy Equilibria are Monotone Pure Strategy Equilibria in Asymmetric First-Price Auctions","authors":"David McAdams","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.321425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.321425","url":null,"abstract":"Every mixed strategy equilibrium is outcome equivalent to a monotone pure strategy equilibrium in asymmetric first-price auctions in which n bidders have affiliated, one-dimensional, atomless types and interdependent values.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"137 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124284346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bidding Lower with Higher Values in Multi-Object Auctions","authors":"David McAdams","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.317980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.317980","url":null,"abstract":"Multi-object auctions differ in an important way from single-object auctions. When bidders have multi-object demand, equilibria can exist in which bids decrease as values increase! Consider a model with n bidders who receive affiliated one-dimensional types t and whose marginal values are non-decreasing in t and strictly increasing in own type ti. In the first-price auction of a single object, all equilibria are monotone (over the range of types that win with positive probability) in that each bidder's equilibrium bid is non-decreasing in type. On the other hand, some or all equilibria may be non-monotone in many multi-object auctions. In particular, examples are provided for the as-bid and uniform-price auctions of identical objects in which (i) some bidder reduces his bids on all units as his type increases in all equilibria and (ii) symmetric bidders all reduce their bids on some units in all equilibria, and for the as-bid auction of non-identical objects in which (iii) bidders have independent types and some bidder reduces his bids on some packages in all equilibria. Fundamentally, this difference in the structure of equilibria is due to the fact that payoffs fail to satisfy strategic complementarity and/or modularity in these multi-object auctions.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116876443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Don't Just Lead, Govern: Implementing Effective it Governance","authors":"P. Weill, Richard Woodham","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.317319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.317319","url":null,"abstract":"Firms achieving above industry average returns from IT investments must be making consistently better IT-related decisions. Effective IT governance is one of the ways these firms achieve superior returns. Many firms are creating IT governance structures that encourage the behavior leading to achieving the firm's business performance goals. We define IT governance as specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. Effective IT governance requires careful analysis about who makes decisions and how decisions are made in at least four critical domains of IT: principles, infrastructure, architecture, and investment and prioritization. We studied the use of IT in large multi-business unit firms in the USA and Europe and found that the typical firm governs IT by following generally accepted guidelines with broad-based inputs and tightly controlled decision rights. However, top-performing firms governed IT differently with governance structures linked to the performance measure on which they excelled (e.g., growth). Designing an effective IT governance structure requires understanding the competing forces in a large organization and creating harmony among business objectives, governance archetype and business performance goals. An effective IT governance structure is the single most important predictor of getting value from IT. To help understand and design more effective governance, we propose an IT governance framework that specifies how decisions are made in the key IT domains. The framework harmonizes desired governance archetypes (i.e., monarchy, feudal, federal and anarchy) and a series of governance mechanisms (e.g., committees, approval processes and organizational forms). The framework is illustrated with effective IT governance at State Street Corporation. Effective IT governance encourages and leverages the ingenuity of all the firm's people in using IT, not just the leaders, while still ensuring compliance with the firm's overall vision and principles. In short, don't just lead, govern","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131175149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Performance Matched Discretionary Accrual Measures","authors":"S. Kothari, A. Leone, Charles E. Wasley","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.264859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.264859","url":null,"abstract":"Prior research shows that extant discretionary accrual models are misspecified when applied to firms with extreme performance. Nonetheless, use of such models in tests of earnings management and market efficiency is commonplace in the literature. We examine the specification and power of the test based on a performance-matched discretionary accrual measure and compare it with traditional discretionary accrual measures (e.g., Jones and Modified-Jones Models). Performance matching is on return on assets and industry and is designed to control for the effect of performance on measured discretionary accruals. The results suggest that our performance-matched discretionary accrual measure is a viable alternative to existing discretionary accrual models for use in earnings management research.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122514571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Use of Recurrent Neural Networks for Strategic Data Mining of Sales","authors":"J. Shanmugasundaram, M.V. Nagendra Prasad, Sanjeev Vadhavkar, Amarjeet R. Gupta","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.300679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.300679","url":null,"abstract":"An increasing number of organizations are involved in the development of strategic information systems for effective linkages with their suppliers, customers, and other channel partners involved in transportation, distribution, warehousing and maintenance activities. An efficient inter-organizational inventory management system based on data mining techniques is a significant step in this direction. This paper discusses the use of neural network based data mining and knowledge discovery techniques to optimize inventory levels in a large medical distribution company. The paper defines the inventory patterns, describes the process of constructing and choosing an appropriate neural network, and highlights problems related to mining of very large quantities of data. The paper identifies the strategic data mining techniques used to address the problem of estimating the future sales of medical products using past sales data. We have used recurrent neural networks to predict future sales because of their power to generalize trends and their ability to store relevant information about past sales. The paper introduces the problem domain and describes the implementation of a distributed recurrent neural network using the real time recurrent learning algorithm. We then describe the validation of this implementation by providing results of tests with well-known examples from the literature. The description and analysis of the predictions made on real world data from a large medical distribution company are then presented.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132397216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Inverse-Optimization-Based Auction Mechanism to Support a Multi-Attribute Rfq Process","authors":"L. Wein, D. Beil","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.295066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.295066","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a manufacturer who uses a reverse, or procurement, auction to determine which supplier will be awarded a contract. Each bid consists of a price and a set of nonprice attributes (e.g., quality, lead time). The manufacturer is assumed to know the parametric form of the suppliers' cost functions (in terms of the nonprice attributes), but has no prior information on the parameter values. We construct a multiround open-ascending auction mechanism, where the manufacturer announces a slightly different scoring rule (i.e., a function that ranks the bids in terms of the price and nonprice attributes) in each round. Via inverse optimization, the manufacturer uses the bids from the first several rounds to learn the suppliers' cost functions, and then in the final round chooses a scoring rule that attempts to maximize his own utility. Under the assumption that suppliers submit their myopic best-response bids in the last round, and do not distort their bids in the earlier rounds (i.e., they choose their minimum-cost bid to achieve any given score), our mechanism, indeed, maximizes the manufacturer's utility within the open-ascending format. We also discuss several enhancements that improve the robustness of our mechanism with respect to the model's informational and behavioral assumptions.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"177 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121684088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Workforce Issues in the Greater Boston Health Care Industry: Implications for Work and Family","authors":"M. Harrington, Ann Bookman, L. Bailyn, Thomas A. Kochan","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.511244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.511244","url":null,"abstract":"This working paper synthesizes critical problems identified by interviews with more than 40 leaders in the Boston area health care industry and places them in the context of work and family issues. At present, the defining circumstance for the health care industry nationally as well as regionally is an extraordinary reorganization, not yet fully negotiated, in the provision and financing of health care. Hoped-for controls on increased costs of medical care have fallen far short of their promise. Pressures to limit expenditures have produced dispiriting conditions for the entire healthcare workforce. Under such strains, relations between managers and workers providing care are uneasy. Five key issues affect a broad cross-section of occupational groups, albeit in different ways: staffing shortages; long work hours and inflexible schedules; degraded and unsupportive working conditions; lack of opportunities for training and advancement; professional and employee voices are insufficiently heard. The paper concludes with possible ways to address such issues.","PeriodicalId":239656,"journal":{"name":"MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper Series","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117032047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}