Reframing the Climate Change Debate to Better Leverage Policy Change: An Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Psychology

U.S. climate change-related policy response is failing, despite scientific consensus on core realities, in part because of comprehensive, simultaneous, yet incommensurable doctrines and political biases. Climate disruption is a critically important agenda for homeland security and emergency management, yet as framed today, the policy communication regime frequently requires many skep-tics or deniers to abandon their opinions, cultural commitments and epistemic frameworks. Public opinion consensus would be optimal, but the traditional edu-cation/information approach is flawed, and continued delays in significant miti-gation and adaptation policy implementation will mean far larger future costs to protect civilian environmental security and national interests. Thus, effective response demands new messaging strategies, pursuing interim progress, lever-aging overlapping consensus, enhancing risk analysis literacy, and construct-ing alternative, intermediary categories of multiple parallel discourse. These framings would center on security, economic interests, public health, religious stewardship, and other themes. Customized audience discourses may enable better public and opinion leader buy-in, partly transcending polarization, since such leaders have a unique ability to help translate and promote these various discourses. In addition, eventual construction of a multi-dimensional map could optimize effective messaging and supportive coalitions. Otherwise, stalemate on climate-related policy and environmental security will continue, with increas-ingly likely catastrophic implication

Inventory Models for Substitutable Products: Optimal Policies and Heuristics

In this paper, we examine the nature of optimal inventory policies in a system where a retailer manages substitutable products. We first consider a system with two products 1 and 2 whose total demand is D and individual demands are negatively correlated. A fixed proportion of the unsatisfied customers for an item will purchase the other item if it is available in inventory. For the single-period case, we show that the optimal inventory levels of the two items can be computed easily and follow what we refer to as "partially decoupled" policies, i.e., base stock policies that are not state dependent, in certain critical regions of interest both when D is known and random. Furthermore, we show that such a partially decoupled base-stock policy is optimal even in a multiperiod version of the problem for known D for a wide range of parameter values and in an N-product single-period model under some restrictive conditions. Using a numerical study, we show that heuristics based on the decoupled inventory policy perform well in conditions more general than the ones assumed to obtain the analytical results. The analytical and numerical results suggest that the approach presented here is most valuable in retail settings for product categories where the level of substitution between items in a category is not high, demand variation at the aggregate level is not high, and service levels or newsvendor ratios are high.inventory/production, stochastic multiperiod inventory models, stockout-based substitution