Supply Chain Structure, Inventory Turnover, and Financial Performance: Evidence from Manufacturing Companies in China

Using data collected by the World Bank, we empirically investigate the relationship between Chinese manufacturers’ supply chain attributes, raw material and finished goods inventory turnover, and return on sales. Our findings indicate that location proximity, relationship continuity, and the relative power of the manufacturer over suppliers and customers have a significant impact on inventory performance, which in turn drives profitability. We especially focus on characteristics unique to China’s business environment. We find that Chinese manufacturing companies have relatively weak operational performance, and better operational performance is associated with closer distance, longer relationship with suppliers and customers, and relative power over suppliers. Unlike their counter parties in some developed countries, Chinese manufacturers’ profitability relies on both downstream and upstream inventory performance, with downstream inventory performance playing a somewhat more important role

Show Me the Money: Dynamic Recommendations for Revenue Maximization

Recommender Systems (RS) play a vital role in applications such as e-commerce and on-demand content streaming. Research on RS has mainly focused on the customer perspective, i.e., accurate prediction of user preferences and maximization of user utilities. As a result, most existing techniques are not explicitly built for revenue maximization, the primary business goal of enterprises. In this work, we explore and exploit a novel connection between RS and the profitability of a business. As recommendations can be seen as an information channel between a business and its customers, it is interesting and important to investigate how to make strategic dynamic recommendations leading to maximum possible revenue. To this end, we propose a novel \model that takes into account a variety of factors including prices, valuations, saturation effects, and competition amongst products. Under this model, we study the problem of finding revenue-maximizing recommendation strategies over a finite time horizon. We show that this problem is NP-hard, but approximation guarantees can be obtained for a slightly relaxed version, by establishing an elegant connection to matroid theory. Given the prohibitively high complexity of the approximation algorithm, we also design intelligent heuristics for the original problem. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two real and synthetic datasets and demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness our algorithms, and that they significantly outperform several intuitive baselines.Comment: Conference version published in PVLDB 7(14). To be presented in the VLDB Conference 2015, in Hawaii. This version gives a detailed submodularity proo

Effects of jet-induced medium excitation in γ\gamma-hadron correlation in A+A collisions

Coupled Linear Boltzmann Transport and hydrodynamics (CoLBT-hydro) is developed for co-current and event-by-event simulations of jet transport and jet-induced medium excitation (j.i.m.e.) in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. This is made possible by a GPU parallelized (3+1)D hydrodynamics that has a source term from the energy-momentum deposition by propagating jet shower partons and provides real time update of the bulk medium evolution for subsequent jet transport. Hadron spectra in $\gamma$-jet events of A+A collisions at RHIC and LHC are calculated for the first time that include hadrons from both the modified jet and j.i.m.e.. CoLBT-hydro describes well experimental data at RHIC on the suppression of leading hadrons due to parton energy loss. It also predicts the enhancement of soft hadrons from j.i.m.e. The onset of soft hadron enhancement occurs at a constant transverse momentum due to the thermal nature of soft hadrons from j.i.m.e. which also have a significantly broadened azimuthal distribution relative to the jet direction. Soft hadrons in the $\gamma$ direction are, on the other hand, depleted due to a diffusion wake behind the jet.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures in LaTeX, final version published in PL