
We investigate the optimal consumption and investment problem when a working debtor has an option to file for bankruptcy. By applying the duality approach, the closed-form solutions are obtained for the case of CRRA utility function. The optimal bankruptcy time is determined by the first hitting time when the financial wealth hits the wealth threshold derived from the optimal stopping time problem. Moreover, the numerical results show that the investment increases as the wealth approaches the threshold and the value gain from the bankruptcy option is vanished as wealth increases.
We analyze how firms' global production activities affect their inventory supply and financial performance in regards to its production location. For the analysis, we use information on global production quantities of 3,076 Korean multinational firms that operate business in Europe and Asia through foreign direct investment (FDI) from 2006 to 2013. Our estimation results show that an increase in global production ratio, measured by global production/total production, decreases inventory supply and financial performance of firms that produce in European countries, while it decreases financial performance of firms that produce in Asian countries. Although our results indicate that global production decreases financial performance of firms that produce in Europe and Asia, we find that its negative effects on financial performance are different based on the market demand uncertainty.
We consider two variants of a time–cost tradeoff problem with multiple assessments on a chain precedence graph. Furthermore, each job can only be started after a release time, and a penalty cost is incurred when a job is not finished before its due date. The motivation is from the project such that a project owner can control the duration of each job and the support level of each project partner to avoid the penalty cost from the tardy jobs. We describe the penalty costs of the first and the second variants as the total weighted number of tardy jobs and the total weighted tardiness, respectively. These can be avoided by compressing the processing times or advancing the release times, which incurs a compression cost or release cost according to the linear and the piecewise constant functions, respectively. The objective is to minimize the total penalty, compression cost and release cost. In this paper, we propose the procedure based on the reduction to a shortest path problem, and show that the procedure can solve two variants in strongly polynomial time.
We consider a two-tier supply chain with multiplicative random yield. We focus on the supply chain performance with respect to the control scheme of determining the production lot size. The profit loss due to distributed control is analyzed to give an insight for devising efficient supply contracts.
We consider an m-machine flow shop scheduling problem to minimize the latest completion time, where processing times are uncertain. Processing time uncertainty is described through a finite set of processing time vectors. The objective is to minimize maximum deviation from optimality for all scenarios. Since this problem is known to be NPhard, we consider it with an ordered property. We discuss optimality properties and develop a pseudo-polynomial time approach for the problem with a fixed number of machines and scenarios. Furthermore, we find two special structures for processing time uncertainty that keep the problem NP-hard, even for two machines and two scenarios. Finally, we investigate a special structure for uncertain processing times that makes the problem polynomially solvable.