140,355 research outputs found

    Calibrated Stochastic Dynamic Models for Resource Management

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    In this paper we develop a positive calibrated approach to stochastic dynamic programming. Risk aversion, discount rate, and intertemporal substitution preferences of the decision-maker are calibrated by a procedure that minimizes the mean squared error from data on past decisions. We apply this framework to managing stochastic water supplies from Oroville Reservoir, located in Northern California. The calibrated positive SDP closely reproduces the historical storage and releases from the dam and shows sensitivity of optimal decisions to a decision-maker's risk aversion and intertemporal preferences. The calibrated model has average prediction errors that are substantially lower than those from the model with an expected net present value objective.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

    Portraying managerial dynamic capabilities : a case study in the fast-moving consumer goods industry

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    This paper presents a case study describing the managerial dynamic capabilities of a firm in the highly competitive fast-moving consumer goods industry and their effects in the performance of the firm and the industry. Managerial dynamic capabilities are processes of managerial decision-making, extending throughout the firm, to determine which particular resources managers identify as strategically important and how they build them. The case study, which was developed with a management team during a period of one year, involved a detailed analysis of the resources perceived strategically relevant and the operating policies aimed at maintaining an adequate balance of the set of key resources. In other words, this paper describes what Winter (2003) defines as 'how we earn our living now' or 'zero-level' capabilities

    The boomerang returns? Accounting for the impact of uncertainties on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems

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    Recent years have witnessed companies abandon traditional open-loop supply chain structures in favour of closed-loop variants, in a bid to mitigate environmental impacts and exploit economic opportunities. Central to the closed-loop paradigm is remanufacturing: the restoration of used products to useful life. While this operational model has huge potential to extend product life-cycles, the collection and recovery processes diminish the effectiveness of existing control mechanisms for open-loop systems. We systematically review the literature in the field of closed-loop supply chain dynamics, which explores the time-varying interactions of material and information flows in the different elements of remanufacturing supply chains. We supplement this with further reviews of what we call the three ‘pillars’ of such systems, i.e. forecasting, collection, and inventory and production control. This provides us with an interdisciplinary lens to investigate how a ‘boomerang’ effect (i.e. sale, consumption, and return processes) impacts on the behaviour of the closed-loop system and to understand how it can be controlled. To facilitate this, we contrast closed-loop supply chain dynamics research to the well-developed research in each pillar; explore how different disciplines have accommodated the supply, process, demand, and control uncertainties; and provide insights for future research on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems

    Fisheries Production: Management Institutions, Spatial Choice, and the Quest for Policy Invariance

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    The fishery-dependent data used to estimate fishing production technologies are shaped by the incentive structures that influence fishermen’s purposeful choices across their multiple margins of production. Using a combination of analytical and simulation methods, we demonstrate how market prices and regulatory institutions influence a dominant short-run margin of production—the deployment of fishing time over space. We show that institutionally driven spatial selection leads to only a partial exploration of the full production set, yielding poorly identified estimates of production possibilities outside of the institutionally dependent status quo. The implication is that many estimated fisheries production functions suffer from a lack of policy invariance and may yield misleading predictions for even the most short-run of policy evaluation tasks. Our findings suggest that accurate assessment of the impacts of a policy intervention requires a description of the fishing production process that is sufficiently structural so as to be invariant to institutional changes.Ye

    Construction of a fuel demand function portraying interfuel substitution, a system dynamics approach

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    Most of the recent numerical market equilibrium models of natural gas markets use imperfect competition assumptions. These models are typically embedded with an oversimplified representation of the demand side, usually a single-variable affine function, that does not capture any dynamic adjustment to past prices. To remedy this, we report an effort to construct an enhanced functional specification using the system dynamics-based model of Moxnes (1987, 1990). Thanks to a vintage representation of capital stock, this putty-clay model captures the effect of both past and current energy prices on fuel consumption. Using a re-calibrated version of this model, we first confirm the pertinence of this modeling framework to represent interfuel substitutions at different fuel prices in the industrial sector. Building on these findings, a dynamic functional specification of the demand function for natural gas is then proposed and calibrated.
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