Editorial

The 11th International Symposium on Operational Research (SOR’11) was organized by Slovenian Society INFORMATIKA – Section for Operational Research (SDI-SOR) in Dolenjske Toplice, Slovenia, during the week of 28 – 30 September 2011. At SOR’11 it was decided to publish a Special Issue of Business Systems Research Journal (SI of BSRJ) on innovative approaches to OR methodology and its applications in business, micro and macro-economics, management, finance, social sciences, energy, environment, transport and other areas. The call for papers for SI of BSRJ was open, and it was directed to the participants of SOR’11 as well as to other researchers and practitioners from the field of OR. We have received 9 submissions for this special issue, some of them being extended journal versions of short conference papers from proceedings (Zadnik Stirn et al., 2011). Each submission was first reviewed by the Guest Editors, and the papers were then blind reviewed by two experts

Macro-financial linkages and bank behaviour: evidence from the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia

This paper studies the link between macro-financial variability and bank behaviour, which justifies the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia. Following Gallego et al. (The impact of the global economic and financial crisis on Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe (CESEE) and Latin America, 2010), the second round effects are defined as the adverse feedback loop from the slumps in economic activities and sharp financial market deterioration, which may influence the financial performance of bank, inter alia via deteriorating credit quality, declining profitability and increasing problems in retaining necessary capitalization. Differentiating itself from other research, this study stresses adjustments in four dimensions of bank performance and behaviour: asset quality, profitability, capital adequacy, and lending behaviour, assuming that any change in a bank-specific characteristic is induced by endogenous adjustments of the others. The empirical results based on partial adjustment models and two-step system GMM estimation show that bank’s adjustment behaviour is subject to the variation in the macro-financial environment and the stress condition in the global financial market. There is no convincing evidence to support the effectiveness of policy rate cut to boots bank lending and to avoid a financial accelerator effect

Decision making based on single and double acceptance sampling plans for assessing quality of lots

Background: Acceptance sampling is a statistical tool of quality control. Sampling plans and operating characteristic (OC) curves are very useful for conducting acceptance sampling and provide the quality manager with tools to evaluate the quality of a production run or shipment. There are developed different sampling plans, but common used in practise are single and double acceptance sampling plans. Objectives: The goal of the paper is to test if applying of single and double sampling plan can lead to statistically significant different conclusion about quality level of observed lot. Methods/Approach: Statistical tests of difference in proportions are used to test if there is some statistically significant difference in probabilities of lot fraction defectives between a single and a double sampling plan at the same levels of probability of acceptance. Results: The results of the analysis show that in some cases there is statistically significant difference. Namely, the quality manager should be careful when he chooses to use, instead of the first, the second sampling plan with different parameters because on that way he could make statistically significant different conclusion about quality level of observed lot. Conclusions: The paper shows that some intentional manipulations by using different sampling plans are possible