The effect of four decades of deregulation on competition and productivity of the U.S. freight transportation industry

This study reviews the competition and productivity of the U.S. freight transportation industry for the past 41 years. This study investigated the trends of HHI market concentration index values and labor productivity values of rail and truck sectors and tried to find any relationships between the two values in the separate periods before and after the abolishment of the ICC. This study also investigated how the existence of a regulatory body impacted productivity of the freight transportation industry by using a Cobb Douglas production function on annual financial statement data in the U.S. stock exchange market. This study found that: while the truck sector became more competitive after the abolishment of the ICC, the rail sector became less competitive, both sectors had a strong positive correlation between HHI and labor productivity, and the ICC’s abolishment resulted in positive changes of total factor productivity for the truck sector only

Effects Of RFID Technology On Efficiency And Profitability In Retail Supply Chains

Ten years have passed since Wal-Mart’s public announcement about its RFID technology adoption plan in 2003. Some large competitors of Wal-Mart in the U.S. retail industry jumped on the trend of RFID technology adoption. However, there has been a slowdown of RFID technology adoption since 2008. Many U.S. retailers do not consider adopting RFID technology because of the uncertainty of return on investment and the lack of business cases demonstrating its profitability or efficiency. This study investigates whether RFID companies have better financial performance ratios in the U.S. retail supply chains. RFID retailers have significantly lower days-in-inventory and lower per-employee costs. Compared with pre-RFID, the RFID retailers do not improve profit ratios after they adopted it, but their days-in-inventory ratio and sales efficiency improve significantly. Panel data regression analyses show that inventory management efficiency does impact gross margins, but the impact of cost efficiency is negligible. RFID retailers have a positive relationship with gross margin increases. In summary, it could be stated that introducing RFID improves inventory management efficiency but we do not know yet if RFID technology adoption also contributes to profitability in U.S. retail industry

Effects of RFID Technology on Profitability and Efficiency in Retail Supply Chains

Many companies do not consider adopting radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology because of the uncertainty of return on investment and the lack of business cases demonstrating its profitability or efficiency. This study investigates whether companies that have adopted RFID technology have better financial performance ratios in the U.S. retail industry. Companies using RFID technology have significantly higher operating income margins, lower inventory ratios, and lower per-employee costs. A regression analysis shows that inventory efficiency and cost efficiency do impact profit margins. The analysis also reveals that maintaining a low-level inventory ratio creates higher profit margins, but more research is still needed to demonstrate that higher profits result when companies adopt RFID technology

Information Technology Investment and National Productivity

Using the country-level information technology (IT) expenditures and productivity data for the period from 1992 to 2000, we estimate production function augmented with IT capital stock in the first-difference form. As discussed in prior studies, we confirm that IT expenditures have significant positive effects on national productivity growth. The effects of IT expenditure on productivity growth hold for a short-term (1-year) as well as for a longer-term (4-year and 8-year). Using two theory-based measures of IT maturity, we find that the IT maturity is an important factor that explains the relationship between IT expenditures and national productivity. In addition, we find that the effect of IT expenditures is even higher when the countries are at the mature stage of IT expenditures. Furthermore, we present evidence that IT externalities improve the effect of IT expenditures on productivity growth

Internet Industry Competition Dynamics: Peering Limitations, Exposure, and Counter Strategies

The Internet industry is vertically integrated with Internet Backbone Providers (IBPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) Although there are many ISPs and IBPs in each stream, both markets are considered independent oligopolies in that there are a few dominant competitors in each market. It is generally accepted that the Internet industry structure has evolved into a four-tier hierarchical structure. The synergistic and codependent nature of the Internet industry is the key element in understanding the competitive environment in which both IBP’s and ISP’s cooperate. Peering is an efficient way to exchange traffic freely within the access tier, nevertheless competitive constraints limit within tier exchanges. This paper combines the value chain model, competitive force model and a game model to illustrate the interconnection competitive perspective between IBP and ISPs and demonstrate why peering is difficult in the local access market

Frequency Domain-based Dataset Distillation

This paper presents FreD, a novel parameterization method for dataset distillation, which utilizes the frequency domain to distill a small-sized synthetic dataset from a large-sized original dataset. Unlike conventional approaches that focus on the spatial domain, FreD employs frequency-based transforms to optimize the frequency representations of each data instance. By leveraging the concentration of spatial domain information on specific frequency components, FreD intelligently selects a subset of frequency dimensions for optimization, leading to a significant reduction in the required budget for synthesizing an instance. Through the selection of frequency dimensions based on the explained variance, FreD demonstrates both theoretical and empirical evidence of its ability to operate efficiently within a limited budget, while better preserving the information of the original dataset compared to conventional parameterization methods. Furthermore, based on the orthogonal compatibility of FreD with existing methods, we confirm that FreD consistently improves the performances of existing distillation methods over the evaluation scenarios with different benchmark datasets. We release the code at https://github.com/sdh0818/FreD.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202

The Effects Of Technology Readiness And Technology Acceptance On Nfc Mobile Payment Services In Korea

The Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment is the integration of NFC enabled smartphones and credit/debit/prepaid cards. Korea is a pioneer in rolling out the NFC mobile payment. Global mobile industries pay attention to whether Korean mobile users accept the new payment service. This study investigates the factors for technology acceptance using an integrated model of technology readiness and technology acceptance. Structured equation modeling is used to analyze the collected data. The four constructs of technology readiness (innovativeness, optimism, discomfort, and insecurity) have significant impact on the perceived ease of use and the two technological characteristics of NFC mobile payment (responsiveness and smartness) also have significant impacts on the perceived usefulness. However, only the perceived usefulness affects significantly on the intention to use. The perceived ease of use affects indirectly on the intention to use through the perceived usefulness. The result of this study suggests that to be a successful payment service, the NFC mobile payment service has to be much more focused on the usefulness against other alternative payment methods

Wal-Marts Dilemma In The 21st Century: Sales Growth Vs. Inventory Growth

Wal-Mart has been a leader in the retail industry since 1980s. In the 21st century, Wal-Marts RFID initiative is another innovation for Wal-Marts supply chain management. Wal-Marts recent business target in the 21Century is making a higher sales growth rate than inventory growth rate. Comparing with financial ratios of Wal-Marts competitors, Wal-Mart has significantly better ratios for days-in-inventory, inventory-sales-ratio, and cash-conversion-cycle. However, there is no significant evidence of better ratios for supply chain related profit ratio. Regression analysis reveals that while days-in-inventory has a similar effect on both sales growth rate and inventory growth rate, supply chain ratio has more effect on inventory growth rate than sales growth rate