33,957 research outputs found
A Multi-criteria Decision-making Model for Evaluating Suppliers in Green SCM
In order to develop recycle economy and friendly saving environment, many business enterprises have deployed green supply chain management (GSCM) practices. By employing related theorise of GSCM, organizations expect to minimize the environment impact caused by their commercial and industrial activities in supply chain. Different suppliers may provide different GSCM practices, so evaluating their GSCM performance to rank the green suppliers is an important aspect in practice. In this paper, a novel decision method named fuzzy generalized regret decision-making method is proposed. The fuzzy generalized regret decision-making method is based on ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator, which is used to effectively aggregate individual regrets related to all stats of nature for an alternative under fuzzy decision-making environment. By combing the proposed method with the application background of GSCM practices, a novel fuzzy decision model for evaluating GSCM performance is further proposed. In the proposed model, the regret of decision maker is taken into consideration with an aim of minimizing the dissatisfaction when choosing the best green supplier. Individual regrets related to all criteria for a green supplier are aggregated to obtain effective regret. Finally, the green suppliers can be ranked according to the effective regrets. A numerical example is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method
Decision-Making with Belief Functions: a Review
Approaches to decision-making under uncertainty in the belief function
framework are reviewed. Most methods are shown to blend criteria for decision
under ignorance with the maximum expected utility principle of Bayesian
decision theory. A distinction is made between methods that construct a
complete preference relation among acts, and those that allow incomparability
of some acts due to lack of information. Methods developed in the imprecise
probability framework are applicable in the Dempster-Shafer context and are
also reviewed. Shafer's constructive decision theory, which substitutes the
notion of goal for that of utility, is described and contrasted with other
approaches. The paper ends by pointing out the need to carry out deeper
investigation of fundamental issues related to decision-making with belief
functions and to assess the descriptive, normative and prescriptive values of
the different approaches
Joint strategy fictitious play with inertia for potential games
We consider multi-player repeated games involving a large number of players with large strategy spaces and enmeshed utility structures. In these ldquolarge-scalerdquo games, players are inherently faced with limitations in both their observational and computational capabilities. Accordingly, players in large-scale games need to make their decisions using algorithms that accommodate limitations in information gathering and processing. This disqualifies some of the well known decision making models such as ldquoFictitious Playrdquo (FP), in which each player must monitor the individual actions of every other player and must optimize over a high dimensional probability space. We will show that Joint Strategy Fictitious Play (JSFP), a close variant of FP, alleviates both the informational and computational burden of FP. Furthermore, we introduce JSFP with inertia, i.e., a probabilistic reluctance to change strategies, and establish the convergence to a pure Nash equilibrium in all generalized ordinal potential games in both cases of averaged or exponentially discounted historical data. We illustrate JSFP with inertia on the specific class of congestion games, a subset of generalized ordinal potential games. In particular, we illustrate the main results on a distributed traffic routing problem and derive tolling procedures that can lead to optimized total traffic congestion
Online Pricing with Offline Data: Phase Transition and Inverse Square Law
This paper investigates the impact of pre-existing offline data on online
learning, in the context of dynamic pricing. We study a single-product dynamic
pricing problem over a selling horizon of periods. The demand in each
period is determined by the price of the product according to a linear demand
model with unknown parameters. We assume that before the start of the selling
horizon, the seller already has some pre-existing offline data. The offline
data set contains samples, each of which is an input-output pair consisting
of a historical price and an associated demand observation. The seller wants to
utilize both the pre-existing offline data and the sequential online data to
minimize the regret of the online learning process.
We characterize the joint effect of the size, location and dispersion of the
offline data on the optimal regret of the online learning process.
Specifically, the size, location and dispersion of the offline data are
measured by the number of historical samples , the distance between the
average historical price and the optimal price , and the standard
deviation of the historical prices , respectively. We show that the
optimal regret is , and design a learning algorithm based on the
"optimism in the face of uncertainty" principle, whose regret is optimal up to
a logarithmic factor. Our results reveal surprising transformations of the
optimal regret rate with respect to the size of the offline data, which we
refer to as phase transitions. In addition, our results demonstrate that the
location and dispersion of the offline data also have an intrinsic effect on
the optimal regret, and we quantify this effect via the inverse-square law.Comment: Forthcoming in Management Scienc
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